(outro music) >> Hey, I'm John Furrier, here with an exclusive interview with Ali Ghodsi, who's the CEO of Databricks. Ali, great to see you. Preview for reinvent. We're going to launch this story, exclusive Databricks material on the notes, after the keynotes prior to the keynotes and after the keynotes that reinvent. So great to see you. You know, you've been a partner of AWS for a very, very long time. I think five years ago, I think I first interviewed you, you were one of the first to publicly declare that this was a place to build a company on and not just post an application, but refactor capabilities to create, essentially a platform in the cloud, on the cloud. Not just an ISV; Independent Software Vendor, kind of an old term, we're talking about real platform like capability to change the game. Can you talk about your experience as an AWS partner? >> Yeah, look, so we started in 2013. I swiped my personal credit card on AWS and some of my co-founders did the same. And we started building. And we were excited because we just thought this is a much better way to launch a company because you can just much faster get time to market and launch your thing and you can get the end users much quicker access to the thing you're building. So we didn't really talk to anyone at AWS, we just swiped a credit card. And eventually they told us, "Hey, do you want to buy extra support?" "You're asking a lot of advanced questions from us." "Maybe you want to buy our advanced support." And we said, no, no, no, no. We're very advanced ourselves, we know what we're doing. We're not going to buy any advanced support. So, you know, we just built this, you know, startup from nothing on AWS without even talking to anyone there. So at some point, I think around 2017, they suddenly saw this company with maybe a hundred million ARR pop up on their radar and it's driving massive amounts of compute, massive amounts of data. And it took a little bit in the beginning just us to get to know each other because as I said, it's like we were not on their radar and we weren't really looking, we were just doing our thing. And then over the years the partnership has deepened and deepened and deepened and then with, you know, Andy (indistinct) really leaning into the partnership, he mentioned us at Reinvent. And then we sort of figured out a way to really integrate the two service, the Databricks platform with AWS . And today it's an amazing partnership. You know, we directly connected with the general managers for the services. We're connected at the CEO level, you know, the sellers get compensated for pushing Databricks, we're, we have multiple offerings on their marketplace. We have a native offering on AWS. You know, we're prominently always sort of marketed and you know, we're aligned also vision wise in what we're trying to do. So yeah, we've come a very, very long way. >> Do you consider yourself a SaaS app or an ISV or do you see yourself more of a platform company because you have customers. How would you categorize your category as a company? >> Well, it's a data platform, right? And actually the, the strategy of the Databricks is take what's otherwise five, six services in the industry or five, six different startups, but do them as part of one data platform that's integrated. So in one word, the strategy of data bricks is "unification." We call it the data lake house. But really the idea behind the data lake house is that of unification, or in more words it's, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." So you could actually go and buy five, six services out there or actually use five, six services from the cloud vendors, stitch it together and it kind of resembles Databricks. Our power is in doing those integrated, together in a way in which it's really, really easy and simple to use for end users. So yeah, we're a data platform. I wouldn't, you know, ISV that's a old term, you know, Independent Software Vendor. You know, I think, you know, we have actually a whole slew of ISVs on top of Databricks, that integrate with our platform. And you know, in our marketplace as well as in our partner connect, we host those ISVs that then, you know, work on top of the data that we have in the Databricks, data lake house. >> You know, I think one of the things your journey has been great to document and watch from the beginning. I got to give you guys credit over there and props, congratulations. But I think you're the poster child as a company to what we see enterprises doing now. So go back in time when you guys swiped a credit card, you didn't need attending technical support because you guys had brains, you were refactoring, rethinking. It wasn't just banging out software, you had, you were doing some complex things. It wasn't like it was just write some software hosted on server. It was really a lot more. And as a result your business worth billions of dollars. I think 38 billion or something like that, big numbers, big numbers of great revenue growth as well, billions in revenue. You have customers, you have an ecosystem, you have data applications on top of Databricks. So in a way you're a cloud on top of the cloud. So is there a cloud on top of the cloud? So you have ISVs, Amazon has ISVs. Can you take us through what this means and at this point in history, because this seems to be an advanced version of benefits of platforming and refactoring, leveraging say AWS. >> Yeah, so look, when we started, there was really only one game in town. It was AWS. So it was one cloud. And the strategy of the company then was, well Amazon had this beautiful set of services that they're building bottom up, they have storage, compute, networking, and then they have databases and so on. But it's a lot of services. So let us not directly compete with AWS and try to take out one of their services. Let's not do that because frankly we can't. We were not of that size. They had the scale, they had the size and they were the only cloud vendor in town. So our strategy instead was, let's do something else. Let's not compete directly with say, a particular service they're building, let's take a different strategy. What if we had a unified holistic data platform, where it's just one integrated service end to end. So think of it as Microsoft office, which contains PowerPoint, and Word, and Excel and even Access, if you want to use it. What if we build that and AWS has this really amazing knack for releasing things, you know services, lots of them, every reinvent. And they're sort of a DevOps person's dream and you can stitch these together and you know you have to be technical. How do we elevate that and make it simpler and integrate it? That was our original strategy and it resonated with a segment of the market. And the reason it worked with AWS so that we wouldn't butt heads with AWS was because we weren't a direct replacement for this service or for that service, we were taking a different approach. And AWS, because credit goes to them, they're so customer obsessed, they would actually do what's right for the customer. So if the customer said we want this unified thing, their sellers would actually say, okay, so then you should use Databricks. So they truly are customer obsessed in that way. And I really mean it, John. Things have changed over the years. They're not the only cloud anymore. You know, Azure is real, GCP is real, there's also Alibaba. And now over 70% of our customers are on more than one cloud. So now what we hear from them is, not only want, do we want a simplified, unified thing, but we want it also to work across the clouds. Because those of them that are seriously considering multiple clouds, they don't want to use a service on cloud one and then use a similar service on cloud two. But it's a little bit different. And now they have to do twice the work to make it work. You know, John, it's hard enough as it is, like it's this data stuff and analytics. It's not a walk in the park, you know. You hire an administrator in the back office that clicks a button and its just, now you're a data driven digital transformed company. It's hard. If you now have to do it again on the second cloud with different set of services and then again on a third cloud with a different set of services. That's very, very costly. So the strategy then has changed that, how do we take that unified simple approach and make it also the same and standardize across the clouds, but then also integrate it as far down as we can on each of the clouds. So that you're not giving up any of the benefits that the particular cloud has. >> Yeah, I think one of the things that we see, and I want get your reaction to this, is this rise of the super cloud as we call it. I think you were involved in the Sky paper that I saw your position paper came out after we had introduced Super Cloud, which is great. Congratulations to the Berkeley team, wearing the hat here. But you guys are, I think a driver of this because you're creating the need for these things. You're saying, okay, we went on one cloud with AWS and you didn't hide that. And now you're publicly saying there's other clouds too, increased ham for your business. And customers have multiple clouds in their infrastructure for the best of breed that they have. Okay, get that. But there's still a challenge around the innovation, growth that's still around the corner. We still have a supply chain problem, we still have skill gaps. You know, you guys are unique at Databricks as other these big examples of super clouds that are developing. Enterprises don't have the Databricks kind of talent. They need, they need turnkey solutions. So Adam and the team at Amazon are promoting, you know, more solution oriented approaches higher up on the stack. You're starting to see kind of like, I won't say templates, but you know, almost like application specific headless like, low code, no code capability to accelerate clients who are wanting to write code for the modern error. Right, so this kind of, and then now you, as you guys pointed out with these common services, you're pushing the envelope. So you're saying, hey, I need to compete, I don't want to go to my customers and have them to have a staff or this cloud and this cloud and this cloud because they don't have the staff. Or if they do, they're very unique. So what's your reaction? Because this kind is the, it kind of shows your leadership as a partner of AWS and the clouds, but also highlights I think what's coming. But you share your reaction. >> Yeah, look, it's, first of all, you know, I wish I could take credit for this but I can't because it's really the customers that have decided to go on multiple clouds. You know, it's not Databricks that you know, push this or some other vendor, you know, that, Snowflake or someone who pushed this and now enterprises listened to us and they picked two clouds. That's not how it happened. The enterprises picked two clouds or three clouds themselves and we can get into why, but they did that. So this largely just happened in the market. We as data platforms responded to what they're then saying, which is they're saying, "I don't want to redo this again on the other cloud." So I think the writing is on the wall. I think it's super obvious what's going to happen next. They will say, "Any service I'm using, it better work exactly the same on all the clouds." You know, that's what's going to happen. So in the next five years, every enterprise will say, "I'm going to use the service, but you better make sure that this service works equally well on all of the clouds." And obviously the multicloud vendors like us, are there to do that. But I actually think that what you're going to see happening is that you're going to see the cloud vendors changing the existing services that they have to make them work on the other clouds. That's what's goin to happen, I think. >> Yeah, and I think I would add that, first of all, I agree with you. I think that's going to be a forcing function. Because I think you're driving it. You guys are in a way, one, are just an actor in the driving this because you're on the front end of this and there are others and there will be people following. But I think to me, I'm a cloud vendor, I got to differentiate. Adam, If I'm Adam Saleski, I got to say, "Hey, I got to differentiate." So I don't wan to get stuck in the middle, so to speak. Am I just going to innovate on the hardware AKA infrastructure or am I going to innovate at the higher level services? So what we're talking about here is the tail of two clouds within Amazon, for instance. So do I innovate on the silicon and get low level into the physics and squeeze performance out of the hardware and infrastructure? Or do I focus on ease of use at the top of the stack for the developers? So again, there's a channel of two clouds here. So I got to ask you, how do they differentiate? Number one and number two, I never heard a developer ever say, "I want to run my app or workload on the slower cloud." So I mean, you know, back when we had PCs you wanted to go, "I want the fastest processor." So again, you can have common level services, but where is that performance differentiation with the cloud? What do the clouds do in your opinion? >> Yeah, look, I think it's pretty clear. I think that it's, this is, you know, no surprise. Probably 70% or so of the revenue is in the lower infrastructure layers, compute, storage, networking. And they have to win that. They have to be competitive there. As you said, you can say, oh you know, I guess my CPUs are slower than the other cloud, but who cares? I have amazing other services which only work on my cloud by the way, right? That's not going to be a winning recipe. So I think all three are laser focused on, we going to have specialized hardware and the nuts and bolts of the infrastructure, we can do it better than the other clouds for sure. And you can see lots of innovation happening there, right? The Graviton chips, you know, we see huge price performance benefits in those chips. I mean it's real, right? It's basically a 20, 30% free lunch. You know, why wouldn't you, why wouldn't you go for it there? There's no downside. You know, there's no, "got you" or no catch. But we see Azure doing the same thing now, they're also building their own chips and we know that Google builds specialized machine learning chips, TPU, Tenor Processing Units. So their legs are focused on that. I don't think they can give up that or focused on higher levels if they had to pick bets. And I think actually in the next few years, most of us have to make more, we have to be more deliberate and calculated in the picks we do. I think in the last five years, most of us have said, "We'll do all of it." You know. >> Well you made a good bet with Spark, you know, the duke was pretty obvious trend that was, everyone was shut on that bandwagon and you guys picked a big bet with Spark. Look what happened with you guys? So again, I love this betting kind of concept because as the world matures, growth slows down and shifts and that next wave of value coming in, AKA customers, they're going to integrate with a new ecosystem. A new kind of partner network for AWS and the other clouds. But with aws they're going to need to nurture the next Databricks. They're going to need to still provide that SaaS, ISV like experience for, you know, a basic software hosting or some application. But I go to get your thoughts on this idea of multiple clouds because if I'm a developer, the old days was, old days, within our decade, full stack developer- >> It was two years ago, yeah (John laughing) >> This is a decade ago, full stack and then the cloud came in, you kind had the half stack and then you would do some things. It seems like the clouds are trying to say, we want to be the full stack or not. Or is it still going to be, you know, I'm an application like a PC and a Mac, I'm going to write the same application for both hardware. I mean what's your take on this? Are they trying to do full stack and you see them more like- >> Absolutely. I mean look, of course they're going, they have, I mean they have over 300, I think Amazon has over 300 services, right? That's not just compute, storage, networking, it's the whole stack, right? But my key point is, I think they have to nail the core infrastructure storage compute networking because the three clouds that are there competing, they're formidable companies with formidable balance sheets and it doesn't look like any of them is going to throw in the towel and say, we give up. So I think it's going to intensify. And given that they have a 70% revenue on that infrastructure layer, I think they, if they have to pick their bets, I think they'll focus it on that infrastructure layer. I think the layer above where they're also placing bets, they're doing that, the full stack, right? But there I think the demand will be, can you make that work on the other clouds? And therein lies an innovator's dilemma because if I make it work on the other clouds, then I'm foregoing that 70% revenue of the infrastructure. I'm not getting it. The other cloud vendor is going to get it. So should I do that or not? Second, is the other cloud vendor going to be welcoming of me making my service work on their cloud if I am a competing cloud, right? And what kind of terms of service are I giving me? And am I going to really invest in doing that? And I think right now we, you know, most, the vast, vast, vast majority of the services only work on the one cloud that you know, it's built on. It doesn't work on others, but this will shift. >> Yeah, I think the innovators dilemma is also very good point. And also add, it's an integrators dilemma too because now you talk about integration across services. So I believe that the super cloud movement's going to happen before Sky. And I think what explained by that, what you guys did and what other companies are doing by representing advanced, I call platform engineering, refactoring an existing market really fast, time to value and CAPEX is, I mean capital, market cap is going to be really fast. I think there's going to be an opportunity for those to emerge that's going to set the table for global multicloud ultimately in the future. So I think you're going to start to see the same pattern of what you guys did get in, leverage the hell out of it, use it, not in the way just to host, but to refactor and take down territory of markets. So number one, and then ultimately you get into, okay, I want to run some SLA across services, then there's a little bit more complication. I think that's where you guys put that beautiful paper out on Sky Computing. Okay, that makes sense. Now if you go to today's market, okay, I'm betting on Amazon because they're the best, this is the best cloud win scenario, not the most robust cloud. So if I'm a developer, I want the best. How do you look at their bet when it comes to data? Because now they've got machine learning, Swami's got a big keynote on Wednesday, I'm expecting to see a lot of AI and machine learning. I'm expecting to hear an end to end data story. This is what you do, so as a major partner, how do you view the moves Amazon's making and the bets they're making with data and machine learning and AI? >> First I want to lift off my hat to AWS for being customer obsessed. So I know that if a customer wants Databricks, I know that AWS and their sellers will actually help us get that customer deploy Databricks. Now which of the services is the customer going to pick? Are they going to pick ours or the end to end, what Swami is going to present on stage? Right? So that's the question we're getting. But I wanted to start with by just saying, their customer obsessed. So I think they're going to do the right thing for the customer and I see the evidence of it again and again and again. So kudos to them. They're amazing at this actually. Ultimately our bet is, customers want this to be simple, integrated, okay? So yes there are hundreds of services that together give you the end to end experience and they're very customizable that AWS gives you. But if you want just something simply integrated that also works across the clouds, then I think there's a special place for Databricks. And I think the lake house approach that we have, which is an integrated, completely integrated, we integrate data lakes with data warehouses, integrate workflows with machine learning, with real time processing, all these in one platform. I think there's going to be tailwinds because I think the most important thing that's going to happen in the next few years is that every customer is going to now be obsessed, given the recession and the environment we're in. How do I cut my costs? How do I cut my costs? And we learn this from the customers they're adopting the lake house because they're thinking, instead of using five vendors or three vendors, I can simplify it down to one with you and I can cut my cost. So I think that's going to be one of the main drivers of why people bet on the lake house because it helps them lower their TCO; Total Cost of Ownership. And it's as simple as that. Like I have three things right now. If I can get the same job done of those three with one, I'd rather do that. And by the way, if it's three or four across two clouds and I can just use one and it just works across two clouds, I'm going to do that. Because my boss is telling me I need to cut my budget. >> (indistinct) (John laughing) >> Yeah, and I'd rather not to do layoffs and they're asking me to do more. How can I get smaller budgets, not lay people off and do more? I have to cut, I have to optimize. What's happened in the last five, six years is there's been a huge sprawl of services and startups, you know, you know most of them, all these startups, all of them, all the activity, all the VC investments, well those companies sold their software, right? Even if a startup didn't make it big, you know, they still sold their software to some vendors. So the ecosystem is now full of lots and lots and lots and lots of different software. And right now people are looking, how do I consolidate, how do I simplify, how do I cut my costs? >> And you guys have a great solution. You're also an arms dealer and a innovator. So I have to ask this question, because you're a professor of the industry as well as at Berkeley, you've seen a lot of the historical innovations. If you look at the moment we're in right now with the recession, okay we had COVID, okay, it changed how people work, you know, people working at home, provisioning VLAN, all that (indistinct) infrastructure, okay, yeah, technology and cloud health. But we're in a recession. This is the first recession where the Amazon and the other cloud, mainly Amazon Web Services is a major economic puzzle in the piece. So they were never around before, even 2008, they were too small. They're now a major economic enabler, player, they're serving startups, enterprises, they have super clouds like you guys. They're a force and the people, their customers are cutting back but also they can also get faster. So agility is now an equation in the economic recovery. And I want to get your thoughts because you just brought that up. Customers can actually use the cloud and Databricks to actually get out of the recovery because no one's going to say, stop making profit or make more profit. So yeah, cut costs, be more efficient, but agility's also like, let's drive more revenue. So in this digital transformation, if you take this to conclusion, every company transforms, their company is the app. So their revenue is tied directly to their technology deployment. What's your reaction and comment to that because this is a new historical moment where cloud and scale and data, actually could be configured in a way to actually change the nature of a business in such a short time. And with the recession looming, no one's got time to wait. >> Yeah, absolutely. Look, the secular tailwind in the market is that of, you know, 10 years ago it was software is eating the world, now it's AI's going to eat all of software software. So more and more we're going to have, wherever you have software, which is everywhere now because it's eaten the world, it's going to be eaten up by AI and data. You know, AI doesn't exist without data so they're synonymous. You can't do machine learning if you don't have data. So yeah, you're going to see that everywhere and that automation will help people simplify things and cut down the costs and automate more things. And in the cloud you can also do that by changing your CAPEX to OPEX. So instead of I invest, you know, 10 million into a data center that I buy, I'm going to have headcount to manage the software. Why don't we change this to OPEX? And then they are going to optimize it. They want to lower the TCO because okay, it's in the cloud. but I do want the costs to be much lower that what they were in the previous years. Last five years, nobody cared. Who cares? You know what it costs. You know, there's a new brave world out there. Now there's like, no, it has to be efficient. So I think they're going to optimize it. And I think this lake house approach, which is an integration of the lakes and the warehouse, allows you to rationalize the two and simplify them. It allows you to basically rationalize away the data warehouse. So I think much faster we're going to see the, why do I need the data warehouse? If I can get the same thing done with the lake house for fraction of the cost, that's what's going to happen. I think there's going to be focus on that simplification. But I agree with you. Ultimately everyone knows, everybody's a software company. Every company out there is a software company and in the next 10 years, all of them are also going to be AI companies. So that is going to continue. >> (indistinct), dev's going to stop. And right sizing right now is a key economic forcing function. Final question for you and I really appreciate you taking the time. This year Reinvent, what's the bumper sticker in your mind around what's the most important industry dynamic, power dynamic, ecosystem dynamic that people should pay attention to as we move from the brave new world of okay, I see cloud, cloud operations. I need to really make it structurally change my business. How do I, what's the most important story? What's the bumper sticker in your mind for Reinvent? >> Bumper sticker? lake house 24. (John laughing) >> That's data (indistinct) bumper sticker. What's the- >> (indistinct) in the market. No, no, no, no. You know, it's, AWS talks about, you know, all of their services becoming a lake house because they want the center of the gravity to be S3, their lake. And they want all the services to directly work on that, so that's a lake house. We're Bumper see Microsoft with Synapse, modern, you know the modern intelligent data platform. Same thing there. We're going to see the same thing, we already seeing it on GCP with Big Lake and so on. So I actually think it's the how do I reduce my costs and the lake house integrates those two. So that's one of the main ways you can rationalize and simplify. You get in the lake house, which is the name itself is a (indistinct) of two things, right? Lake house, "lake" gives you the AI, "house" give you the database data warehouse. So you get your AI and you get your data warehousing in one place at the lower cost. So for me, the bumper sticker is lake house, you know, 24. >> All right. Awesome Ali, well thanks for the exclusive interview. Appreciate it and get to see you. Congratulations on your success and I know you guys are going to be fine. >> Awesome. Thank you John. It's always a pleasure. >> Always great to chat with you again. >> Likewise. >> You guys are a great team. We're big fans of what you guys have done. We think you're an example of what we call "super cloud." Which is getting the hype up and again your paper speaks to some of the innovation, which I agree with by the way. I think that that approach of not forcing standards is really smart. And I think that's absolutely correct, that having the market still innovate is going to be key. standards with- >> Yeah, I love it. We're big fans too, you know, you're doing awesome work. We'd love to continue the partnership. >> So, great, great Ali, thanks. >> Take care (outro music)

(outro music) >> Hey, I'm John Furrier, here with an exclusive interview with Ali Ghodsi, who's the CEO of Databricks. Ali, great to see you. Preview for reinvent. We're going to launch this story, exclusive Databricks material on the notes, after the keynotes prior to the keynotes and after the keynotes that reinvent. So great to see you. You know, you've been a partner of AWS for a very, very long time. I think five years ago, I think I first interviewed you, you were one of the first to publicly declare that this was a place to build a company on and not just post an application, but refactor capabilities to create, essentially a platform in the cloud, on the cloud. Not just an ISV; Independent Software Vendor, kind of an old term, we're talking about real platform like capability to change the game. Can you talk about your experience as an AWS partner? >> Yeah, look, so we started in 2013. I swiped my personal credit card on AWS and some of my co-founders did the same. And we started building. And we were excited because we just thought this is a much better way to launch a company because you can just much faster get time to market and launch your thing and you can get the end users much quicker access to the thing you're building. So we didn't really talk to anyone at AWS, we just swiped a credit card. And eventually they told us, "Hey, do you want to buy extra support?" "You're asking a lot of advanced questions from us." "Maybe you want to buy our advanced support." And we said, no, no, no, no. We're very advanced ourselves, we know what we're doing. We're not going to buy any advanced support. So, you know, we just built this, you know, startup from nothing on AWS without even talking to anyone there. So at some point, I think around 2017, they suddenly saw this company with maybe a hundred million ARR pop up on their radar and it's driving massive amounts of compute, massive amounts of data. And it took a little bit in the beginning just us to get to know each other because as I said, it's like we were not on their radar and we weren't really looking, we were just doing our thing. And then over the years the partnership has deepened and deepened and deepened and then with, you know, Andy (indistinct) really leaning into the partnership, he mentioned us at Reinvent. And then we sort of figured out a way to really integrate the two service, the Databricks platform with AWS . And today it's an amazing partnership. You know, we directly connected with the general managers for the services. We're connected at the CEO level, you know, the sellers get compensated for pushing Databricks, we're, we have multiple offerings on their marketplace. We have a native offering on AWS. You know, we're prominently always sort of marketed and you know, we're aligned also vision wise in what we're trying to do. So yeah, we've come a very, very long way. >> Do you consider yourself a SaaS app or an ISV or do you see yourself more of a platform company because you have customers. How would you categorize your category as a company? >> Well, it's a data platform, right? And actually the, the strategy of the Databricks is take what's otherwise five, six services in the industry or five, six different startups, but do them as part of one data platform that's integrated. So in one word, the strategy of data bricks is "unification." We call it the data lake house. But really the idea behind the data lake house is that of unification, or in more words it's, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." So you could actually go and buy five, six services out there or actually use five, six services from the cloud vendors, stitch it together and it kind of resembles Databricks. Our power is in doing those integrated, together in a way in which it's really, really easy and simple to use for end users. So yeah, we're a data platform. I wouldn't, you know, ISV that's a old term, you know, Independent Software Vendor. You know, I think, you know, we have actually a whole slew of ISVs on top of Databricks, that integrate with our platform. And you know, in our marketplace as well as in our partner connect, we host those ISVs that then, you know, work on top of the data that we have in the Databricks, data lake house. >> You know, I think one of the things your journey has been great to document and watch from the beginning. I got to give you guys credit over there and props, congratulations. But I think you're the poster child as a company to what we see enterprises doing now. So go back in time when you guys swiped a credit card, you didn't need attending technical support because you guys had brains, you were refactoring, rethinking. It wasn't just banging out software, you had, you were doing some complex things. It wasn't like it was just write some software hosted on server. It was really a lot more. And as a result your business worth billions of dollars. I think 38 billion or something like that, big numbers, big numbers of great revenue growth as well, billions in revenue. You have customers, you have an ecosystem, you have data applications on top of Databricks. So in a way you're a cloud on top of the cloud. So is there a cloud on top of the cloud? So you have ISVs, Amazon has ISVs. Can you take us through what this means and at this point in history, because this seems to be an advanced version of benefits of platforming and refactoring, leveraging say AWS. >> Yeah, so look, when we started, there was really only one game in town. It was AWS. So it was one cloud. And the strategy of the company then was, well Amazon had this beautiful set of services that they're building bottom up, they have storage, compute, networking, and then they have databases and so on. But it's a lot of services. So let us not directly compete with AWS and try to take out one of their services. Let's not do that because frankly we can't. We were not of that size. They had the scale, they had the size and they were the only cloud vendor in town. So our strategy instead was, let's do something else. Let's not compete directly with say, a particular service they're building, let's take a different strategy. What if we had a unified holistic data platform, where it's just one integrated service end to end. So think of it as Microsoft office, which contains PowerPoint, and Word, and Excel and even Access, if you want to use it. What if we build that and AWS has this really amazing knack for releasing things, you know services, lots of them, every reinvent. And they're sort of a DevOps person's dream and you can stitch these together and you know you have to be technical. How do we elevate that and make it simpler and integrate it? That was our original strategy and it resonated with a segment of the market. And the reason it worked with AWS so that we wouldn't butt heads with AWS was because we weren't a direct replacement for this service or for that service, we were taking a different approach. And AWS, because credit goes to them, they're so customer obsessed, they would actually do what's right for the customer. So if the customer said we want this unified thing, their sellers would actually say, okay, so then you should use Databricks. So they truly are customer obsessed in that way. And I really mean it, John. Things have changed over the years. They're not the only cloud anymore. You know, Azure is real, GCP is real, there's also Alibaba. And now over 70% of our customers are on more than one cloud. So now what we hear from them is, not only want, do we want a simplified, unified thing, but we want it also to work across the clouds. Because those of them that are seriously considering multiple clouds, they don't want to use a service on cloud one and then use a similar service on cloud two. But it's a little bit different. And now they have to do twice the work to make it work. You know, John, it's hard enough as it is, like it's this data stuff and analytics. It's not a walk in the park, you know. You hire an administrator in the back office that clicks a button and its just, now you're a data driven digital transformed company. It's hard. If you now have to do it again on the second cloud with different set of services and then again on a third cloud with a different set of services. That's very, very costly. So the strategy then has changed that, how do we take that unified simple approach and make it also the same and standardize across the clouds, but then also integrate it as far down as we can on each of the clouds. So that you're not giving up any of the benefits that the particular cloud has. >> Yeah, I think one of the things that we see, and I want get your reaction to this, is this rise of the super cloud as we call it. I think you were involved in the Sky paper that I saw your position paper came out after we had introduced Super Cloud, which is great. Congratulations to the Berkeley team, wearing the hat here. But you guys are, I think a driver of this because you're creating the need for these things. You're saying, okay, we went on one cloud with AWS and you didn't hide that. And now you're publicly saying there's other clouds too, increased ham for your business. And customers have multiple clouds in their infrastructure for the best of breed that they have. Okay, get that. But there's still a challenge around the innovation, growth that's still around the corner. We still have a supply chain problem, we still have skill gaps. You know, you guys are unique at Databricks as other these big examples of super clouds that are developing. Enterprises don't have the Databricks kind of talent. They need, they need turnkey solutions. So Adam and the team at Amazon are promoting, you know, more solution oriented approaches higher up on the stack. You're starting to see kind of like, I won't say templates, but you know, almost like application specific headless like, low code, no code capability to accelerate clients who are wanting to write code for the modern error. Right, so this kind of, and then now you, as you guys pointed out with these common services, you're pushing the envelope. So you're saying, hey, I need to compete, I don't want to go to my customers and have them to have a staff or this cloud and this cloud and this cloud because they don't have the staff. Or if they do, they're very unique. So what's your reaction? Because this kind is the, it kind of shows your leadership as a partner of AWS and the clouds, but also highlights I think what's coming. But you share your reaction. >> Yeah, look, it's, first of all, you know, I wish I could take credit for this but I can't because it's really the customers that have decided to go on multiple clouds. You know, it's not Databricks that you know, push this or some other vendor, you know, that, Snowflake or someone who pushed this and now enterprises listened to us and they picked two clouds. That's not how it happened. The enterprises picked two clouds or three clouds themselves and we can get into why, but they did that. So this largely just happened in the market. We as data platforms responded to what they're then saying, which is they're saying, "I don't want to redo this again on the other cloud." So I think the writing is on the wall. I think it's super obvious what's going to happen next. They will say, "Any service I'm using, it better work exactly the same on all the clouds." You know, that's what's going to happen. So in the next five years, every enterprise will say, "I'm going to use the service, but you better make sure that this service works equally well on all of the clouds." And obviously the multicloud vendors like us, are there to do that. But I actually think that what you're going to see happening is that you're going to see the cloud vendors changing the existing services that they have to make them work on the other clouds. That's what's goin to happen, I think. >> Yeah, and I think I would add that, first of all, I agree with you. I think that's going to be a forcing function. Because I think you're driving it. You guys are in a way, one, are just an actor in the driving this because you're on the front end of this and there are others and there will be people following. But I think to me, I'm a cloud vendor, I got to differentiate. Adam, If I'm Adam Saleski, I got to say, "Hey, I got to differentiate." So I don't wan to get stuck in the middle, so to speak. Am I just going to innovate on the hardware AKA infrastructure or am I going to innovate at the higher level services? So what we're talking about here is the tail of two clouds within Amazon, for instance. So do I innovate on the silicon and get low level into the physics and squeeze performance out of the hardware and infrastructure? Or do I focus on ease of use at the top of the stack for the developers? So again, there's a channel of two clouds here. So I got to ask you, how do they differentiate? Number one and number two, I never heard a developer ever say, "I want to run my app or workload on the slower cloud." So I mean, you know, back when we had PCs you wanted to go, "I want the fastest processor." So again, you can have common level services, but where is that performance differentiation with the cloud? What do the clouds do in your opinion? >> Yeah, look, I think it's pretty clear. I think that it's, this is, you know, no surprise. Probably 70% or so of the revenue is in the lower infrastructure layers, compute, storage, networking. And they have to win that. They have to be competitive there. As you said, you can say, oh you know, I guess my CPUs are slower than the other cloud, but who cares? I have amazing other services which only work on my cloud by the way, right? That's not going to be a winning recipe. So I think all three are laser focused on, we going to have specialized hardware and the nuts and bolts of the infrastructure, we can do it better than the other clouds for sure. And you can see lots of innovation happening there, right? The Graviton chips, you know, we see huge price performance benefits in those chips. I mean it's real, right? It's basically a 20, 30% free lunch. You know, why wouldn't you, why wouldn't you go for it there? There's no downside. You know, there's no, "got you" or no catch. But we see Azure doing the same thing now, they're also building their own chips and we know that Google builds specialized machine learning chips, TPU, Tenor Processing Units. So their legs are focused on that. I don't think they can give up that or focused on higher levels if they had to pick bets. And I think actually in the next few years, most of us have to make more, we have to be more deliberate and calculated in the picks we do. I think in the last five years, most of us have said, "We'll do all of it." You know. >> Well you made a good bet with Spark, you know, the duke was pretty obvious trend that was, everyone was shut on that bandwagon and you guys picked a big bet with Spark. Look what happened with you guys? So again, I love this betting kind of concept because as the world matures, growth slows down and shifts and that next wave of value coming in, AKA customers, they're going to integrate with a new ecosystem. A new kind of partner network for AWS and the other clouds. But with aws they're going to need to nurture the next Databricks. They're going to need to still provide that SaaS, ISV like experience for, you know, a basic software hosting or some application. But I go to get your thoughts on this idea of multiple clouds because if I'm a developer, the old days was, old days, within our decade, full stack developer- >> It was two years ago, yeah (John laughing) >> This is a decade ago, full stack and then the cloud came in, you kind had the half stack and then you would do some things. It seems like the clouds are trying to say, we want to be the full stack or not. Or is it still going to be, you know, I'm an application like a PC and a Mac, I'm going to write the same application for both hardware. I mean what's your take on this? Are they trying to do full stack and you see them more like- >> Absolutely. I mean look, of course they're going, they have, I mean they have over 300, I think Amazon has over 300 services, right? That's not just compute, storage, networking, it's the whole stack, right? But my key point is, I think they have to nail the core infrastructure storage compute networking because the three clouds that are there competing, they're formidable companies with formidable balance sheets and it doesn't look like any of them is going to throw in the towel and say, we give up. So I think it's going to intensify. And given that they have a 70% revenue on that infrastructure layer, I think they, if they have to pick their bets, I think they'll focus it on that infrastructure layer. I think the layer above where they're also placing bets, they're doing that, the full stack, right? But there I think the demand will be, can you make that work on the other clouds? And therein lies an innovator's dilemma because if I make it work on the other clouds, then I'm foregoing that 70% revenue of the infrastructure. I'm not getting it. The other cloud vendor is going to get it. So should I do that or not? Second, is the other cloud vendor going to be welcoming of me making my service work on their cloud if I am a competing cloud, right? And what kind of terms of service are I giving me? And am I going to really invest in doing that? And I think right now we, you know, most, the vast, vast, vast majority of the services only work on the one cloud that you know, it's built on. It doesn't work on others, but this will shift. >> Yeah, I think the innovators dilemma is also very good point. And also add, it's an integrators dilemma too because now you talk about integration across services. So I believe that the super cloud movement's going to happen before Sky. And I think what explained by that, what you guys did and what other companies are doing by representing advanced, I call platform engineering, refactoring an existing market really fast, time to value and CAPEX is, I mean capital, market cap is going to be really fast. I think there's going to be an opportunity for those to emerge that's going to set the table for global multicloud ultimately in the future. So I think you're going to start to see the same pattern of what you guys did get in, leverage the hell out of it, use it, not in the way just to host, but to refactor and take down territory of markets. So number one, and then ultimately you get into, okay, I want to run some SLA across services, then there's a little bit more complication. I think that's where you guys put that beautiful paper out on Sky Computing. Okay, that makes sense. Now if you go to today's market, okay, I'm betting on Amazon because they're the best, this is the best cloud win scenario, not the most robust cloud. So if I'm a developer, I want the best. How do you look at their bet when it comes to data? Because now they've got machine learning, Swami's got a big keynote on Wednesday, I'm expecting to see a lot of AI and machine learning. I'm expecting to hear an end to end data story. This is what you do, so as a major partner, how do you view the moves Amazon's making and the bets they're making with data and machine learning and AI? >> First I want to lift off my hat to AWS for being customer obsessed. So I know that if a customer wants Databricks, I know that AWS and their sellers will actually help us get that customer deploy Databricks. Now which of the services is the customer going to pick? Are they going to pick ours or the end to end, what Swami is going to present on stage? Right? So that's the question we're getting. But I wanted to start with by just saying, their customer obsessed. So I think they're going to do the right thing for the customer and I see the evidence of it again and again and again. So kudos to them. They're amazing at this actually. Ultimately our bet is, customers want this to be simple, integrated, okay? So yes there are hundreds of services that together give you the end to end experience and they're very customizable that AWS gives you. But if you want just something simply integrated that also works across the clouds, then I think there's a special place for Databricks. And I think the lake house approach that we have, which is an integrated, completely integrated, we integrate data lakes with data warehouses, integrate workflows with machine learning, with real time processing, all these in one platform. I think there's going to be tailwinds because I think the most important thing that's going to happen in the next few years is that every customer is going to now be obsessed, given the recession and the environment we're in. How do I cut my costs? How do I cut my costs? And we learn this from the customers they're adopting the lake house because they're thinking, instead of using five vendors or three vendors, I can simplify it down to one with you and I can cut my cost. So I think that's going to be one of the main drivers of why people bet on the lake house because it helps them lower their TCO; Total Cost of Ownership. And it's as simple as that. Like I have three things right now. If I can get the same job done of those three with one, I'd rather do that. And by the way, if it's three or four across two clouds and I can just use one and it just works across two clouds, I'm going to do that. Because my boss is telling me I need to cut my budget. >> (indistinct) (John laughing) >> Yeah, and I'd rather not to do layoffs and they're asking me to do more. How can I get smaller budgets, not lay people off and do more? I have to cut, I have to optimize. What's happened in the last five, six years is there's been a huge sprawl of services and startups, you know, you know most of them, all these startups, all of them, all the activity, all the VC investments, well those companies sold their software, right? Even if a startup didn't make it big, you know, they still sold their software to some vendors. So the ecosystem is now full of lots and lots and lots and lots of different software. And right now people are looking, how do I consolidate, how do I simplify, how do I cut my costs? >> And you guys have a great solution. You're also an arms dealer and a innovator. So I have to ask this question, because you're a professor of the industry as well as at Berkeley, you've seen a lot of the historical innovations. If you look at the moment we're in right now with the recession, okay we had COVID, okay, it changed how people work, you know, people working at home, provisioning VLAN, all that (indistinct) infrastructure, okay, yeah, technology and cloud health. But we're in a recession. This is the first recession where the Amazon and the other cloud, mainly Amazon Web Services is a major economic puzzle in the piece. So they were never around before, even 2008, they were too small. They're now a major economic enabler, player, they're serving startups, enterprises, they have super clouds like you guys. They're a force and the people, their customers are cutting back but also they can also get faster. So agility is now an equation in the economic recovery. And I want to get your thoughts because you just brought that up. Customers can actually use the cloud and Databricks to actually get out of the recovery because no one's going to say, stop making profit or make more profit. So yeah, cut costs, be more efficient, but agility's also like, let's drive more revenue. So in this digital transformation, if you take this to conclusion, every company transforms, their company is the app. So their revenue is tied directly to their technology deployment. What's your reaction and comment to that because this is a new historical moment where cloud and scale and data, actually could be configured in a way to actually change the nature of a business in such a short time. And with the recession looming, no one's got time to wait. >> Yeah, absolutely. Look, the secular tailwind in the market is that of, you know, 10 years ago it was software is eating the world, now it's AI's going to eat all of software software. So more and more we're going to have, wherever you have software, which is everywhere now because it's eaten the world, it's going to be eaten up by AI and data. You know, AI doesn't exist without data so they're synonymous. You can't do machine learning if you don't have data. So yeah, you're going to see that everywhere and that automation will help people simplify things and cut down the costs and automate more things. And in the cloud you can also do that by changing your CAPEX to OPEX. So instead of I invest, you know, 10 million into a data center that I buy, I'm going to have headcount to manage the software. Why don't we change this to OPEX? And then they are going to optimize it. They want to lower the TCO because okay, it's in the cloud. but I do want the costs to be much lower that what they were in the previous years. Last five years, nobody cared. Who cares? You know what it costs. You know, there's a new brave world out there. Now there's like, no, it has to be efficient. So I think they're going to optimize it. And I think this lake house approach, which is an integration of the lakes and the warehouse, allows you to rationalize the two and simplify them. It allows you to basically rationalize away the data warehouse. So I think much faster we're going to see the, why do I need the data warehouse? If I can get the same thing done with the lake house for fraction of the cost, that's what's going to happen. I think there's going to be focus on that simplification. But I agree with you. Ultimately everyone knows, everybody's a software company. Every company out there is a software company and in the next 10 years, all of them are also going to be AI companies. So that is going to continue. >> (indistinct), dev's going to stop. And right sizing right now is a key economic forcing function. Final question for you and I really appreciate you taking the time. This year Reinvent, what's the bumper sticker in your mind around what's the most important industry dynamic, power dynamic, ecosystem dynamic that people should pay attention to as we move from the brave new world of okay, I see cloud, cloud operations. I need to really make it structurally change my business. How do I, what's the most important story? What's the bumper sticker in your mind for Reinvent? >> Bumper sticker? lake house 24. (John laughing) >> That's data (indistinct) bumper sticker. What's the- >> (indistinct) in the market. No, no, no, no. You know, it's, AWS talks about, you know, all of their services becoming a lake house because they want the center of the gravity to be S3, their lake. And they want all the services to directly work on that, so that's a lake house. We're Bumper see Microsoft with Synapse, modern, you know the modern intelligent data platform. Same thing there. We're going to see the same thing, we already seeing it on GCP with Big Lake and so on. So I actually think it's the how do I reduce my costs and the lake house integrates those two. So that's one of the main ways you can rationalize and simplify. You get in the lake house, which is the name itself is a (indistinct) of two things, right? Lake house, "lake" gives you the AI, "house" give you the database data warehouse. So you get your AI and you get your data warehousing in one place at the lower cost. So for me, the bumper sticker is lake house, you know, 24. >> All right. Awesome Ali, well thanks for the exclusive interview. Appreciate it and get to see you. Congratulations on your success and I know you guys are going to be fine. >> Awesome. Thank you John. It's always a pleasure. >> Always great to chat with you again. >> Likewise. >> You guys are a great team. We're big fans of what you guys have done. We think you're an example of what we call "super cloud." Which is getting the hype up and again your paper speaks to some of the innovation, which I agree with by the way. I think that that approach of not forcing standards is really smart. And I think that's absolutely correct, that having the market still innovate is going to be key. standards with- >> Yeah, I love it. We're big fans too, you know, you're doing awesome work. We'd love to continue the partnership. >> So, great, great Ali, thanks. >> Take care (outro music)

(intro upbeat music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to our continued coverage of AWS re:Invent here on theCUBE. My name is Savannah Peterson and I am very excited about the conversation coming up. Not only are we joined by two brilliant minds in the cloud, one of them happens to be a CUBE alumni. Please welcome Mike from AMD and Ali from Dropbox. Ali, welcome back to the show, how you been? >> Thanks Savannah. I'm doing great and really excited to be back on theCUBE. It was great discussion last time and really excited for both re:Invent and also to see how this video turns out. >> Hey, that makes two of us and probably three of us. How are you doing today, Mike? >> Doing great. It's really nice to be getting back to in-person events again and to be out solving problems with customers and partners like Dropbox. >> I know, isn't it? We've all missed each other. Was a lonely couple of years. Mike, I'm going to open it up with you. I'm sure a lot of people are curious. What's new at AMD? >> Well, there's a lot that's new at AMD, so I'll share a subset of what's new and what we've been working on. We've expanded our global coverage in Amazon EC2 with new regions and instance types. So users can deploy any application pretty much anywhere AWS has a presence. Our partner ecosystems for solutions and services has expanded quite a bit. We're currently focused on enabling partners and solutions that focus on cloud cost optimization, modernizing infrastructure, and pushing performance to the limit, especially for HPC. But the biggest buzz, of course, is around AMD's new fourth generation of our EPYC CPU Genoa. It's the world's fastest data center CPU with transformative energy efficiency and that's a really interesting combination, highest performance and most efficient. So on launch day, AWS announced their plans to roll out AMD EPYC Genoa processor-based EC2 instances. So we're pretty excited about that and that's what we'll be working on in the near term. >> Wow, that's a big deal and certainly not a casual announcement. Obviously, power and efficiency hot topics here at re:Invent but also looking at the greater impact on the planet is a big conversation we've been having here as well. So this is exciting and timely and congratulations to you and the team on all that seems to be going on. Ali, what's going on at Dropbox? >> Yeah, thanks Savannah. The Q3 2022 was actually a very strong quarter for Dropbox during a very difficult macroeconomic backdrop. Our focus has continued to be on innovation and this is around both new products and also driving multi-product adoption which is paying a lot of dividends for us, so essentially, bringing products like Dropbox Sign, DocSend, Capture, and other exciting products to our customers. On the infra side, it's all about how do we scale our infrastructure to meet the business needs, right? How do we keep up with the accelerated growth during the pandemic and also leveraging both AMD and AWS for investments in our public cloud? >> Let's talk about the cloud a bit. You are both cloud experts and I'm glad that you brought that up. We'll keep it there with Ali. When, why, and how should users leverage public cloud? >> Yeah, so Dropbox is hybrid cloud which means we are running applications both in private and public cloud and within a unique position to leverage the best of both worlds. And Savannah, this is a decision we continue to reevaluate on a regular basis. And there are really three key factors that come into play here. First is scale and scale, are we operating at a scale where customization is cost-efficient for us? Next is uniqueness. Is our workload unique compared to what the public cloud supports? And lastly, innovation. Do we have the expertise to innovate faster than public cloud or not? So based on these three key factors, we try and balance all of them and then come up with the best option for us at Dropbox. And kind of elaborating over here, things like international storage, we're leveraging public cloud, things like AI and ML, we're leveraging public cloud, but when we talk about Magic Pocket, which is our multi-exabyte storage system, that has the scale which is why we are doing that on our own private cloud. >> Wow, I think you just gave everybody a fantastic framework for thinking about their decision matrix there if nothing else. Mike, is there anything that you'd like to add to that? Anything that AMD considers when contemplating public cloud versus private? >> Yeah, so there's really three main drivers that I see when users consider when, why, and how should they leverage public cloud. Three main drivers: establishing a global footprint, accelerating product release cycles, and efficiently rightsizing infrastructure. So customers looking to establish a global footprint often turn to public cloud deployments to quickly reach their clients in workforces around the world, most importantly with minimal capital expense. I understand Dropbox uses public cloud to establish their global presence scaling out from their core data centers in North America. And then a lot of industries have tremendous pressure to accelerate product release cycles. With public cloud, organizations can immediately deploy new applications without a long site and hardware acquisition cycle and then the associated ongoing maintenance and operational overhead. And the third thing is customers that need to rightsize and dynamically scale their infrastructure and application deployments are drawn to public cloud, for example, customers that have cyclical compute or application load peaks can efficiently deploy in the cloud without overdeploying their on-prem infrastructure for most of the year which is off-peak during those off-peak times. That infrastructure idle time is a waste of resources and OPEX. So scalable rightsizing draws a lot of users to cloud deployment. >> Yeah, wow. I think there's a lot of factors to consider but also it seems like a pretty streamlined process for navigating that or at least you two both made it sound that way. Another hot topic in the space right now is security. Mike, let's start with you a little bit. What are the most important security issues for AMD right now that you can talk about? >> Yeah, sure. So, well, first of all, AWS provides a wide variety of really good security services to protect customers that are working in the cloud. Like from a processor technology perspective, there's three main security aspects to consider, two of which are common practice today and one of which AMD brings significant differentiation and value. The first two are protecting data at rest and data in transit. And these two are part of the prevalent security models of today where AMD provides distinct value and differentiation is in protecting data in use. So EPYC Milan and Genoa processors support a function called SEV-SNP and this enables users to reside and their applications to reside within their own cryptographic context and environment with data integrity protection to accomplish what's called comprehensive confidential computing. Ethics confidential computing solution is hardware-based. So it's easy to leverage, there's no code rewrite required unlike comparable solutions that are software-based that require recoding to a proprietary SDK and come with a significant performance trade-off. So with EPYC processors, you can protect your data at rest, in transit, and most importantly, in use. >> Everybody needs to protect their data everywhere it is. So I love that. That's fantastic to hear and I'm sure gives your customers a lot of confidence. What about over at Dropbox? What security issues are you facing, Ali? >> Yeah, so the first company value at Dropbox is actually being worthy of trust, and what this really means from a security perspective is how do we keep all of our users content safe? And this means keeping everything down to all of the infrastructure hardware secure. So partnering with AMD, which is one of our strongest partners out there, the new security features that AMD have and the hardware are critical for us and we are able to take advantage of some of these best security practices within our compute infrastructure by leveraging AMD's secure ship architecture. >> How important, you just touched on it a little bit, and I want to ask, how important are partnerships like the one you have with each other as you innovate at scale? Ali, you're nodding, I'm going to go to you first. >> Yeah, so like I mentioned, the partnership with with AMD is one of the strongest that we have and it just goes beyond like a regular partnership where it's just buy and sell. We talk about technology together, we talk about innovation together, we talk about partnership together, and for us, as I look look at our hybrid cloud strategy, we would not be able to get the benefits in terms of efficiency, scale, or liability performance without having a strong partner like AMD. >> That's awesome. Mike, anything you want to add there? >> I'd reiterate some of what Ali had to say. One of my favorite parts about my job is getting together with partners and customers to figure out how to optimize their applications and deployments around the world to get the most efficient use of the cloud infrastructure for servers that are based on AMD technology. In many cases, we can find 10% or better performance or cost optimization by working closely with partners like Dropbox. And then in addition, if we keep in lock step together to look at what's coming on the roadmap, by the time the latest and greatest technology is finally deployed, our customers and our partners are ready to take advantage of it. So that's the fun part of the job and I really appreciate the Dropbox's cooperation, optimizing their infrastructure, and using AMD products >> Well, what a synergistic relationship of mutual admiration and support. We love to hear it here in the tech world. Mike, last question for you. What's next for AMD? >> Well, heading into 2023, considering the current challenge macroeconomic environment and geopolitical instability, doing more with less will be top of mind for many CFOs and CEOs in 2023. And AMD can help accomplish that. AMD's EPYC processors, leadership performance, and lower EC2 retail costs can help users reduce costs without impacting performance, or the flip side of that, they can scale capacity without increasing costs. And because of EPYC's higher core counts, really high core density, applications can be deployed with fewer servers or smaller instances that has both economic and environmental benefits that reduce usage costs as well as environmental impacts. And that allows customers to optimize their application and infrastructure spend. And then the second thing that I've seen over the last couple of years and I see this trajectory continuing is increased geographic distribution of our colleagues and workforces is here to stay, people work from everywhere. In modern cross platform, collaboration platforms, that bring teams, tools, and content together have a really important role to play to enable that new, more flexible style of working. And those tools need to be really agile and easy to use. I think Dropbox is really well positioned to enable this new style of working. AMD's really happy to work closely with Dropbox to enable these modern work styles, both on premises, hybrid, and fully in the public cloud. >> Well, it sounds like a very exciting and optimistically, bright future for you all at AMD. We love to hear that here at theCUBE. Ali, what about you? What is 2023 going to hold for Dropbox? >> Yeah, so I think we're going to continue on this journey of transformation where our focus is on new products and also multi-product adoption. And from a cloud perspective, how do we continue to evolve our hybrid cloud so that we remain a competitive advantage for our business and also for our customers? I think right now, Savannah, we're in a very unique position to utilize some of the best AMD technology that's out there and that's both on premise and in the cloud. Some of the AMD Epic processors delivered the performance that we need for our hybrid cloud and we want to continue to leverage these also in public cloud which is the EC2 instances that are powered by AMD in the long run. So overall, Dropbox is looking forward to continue to evaluate some of the AMD's Genoa CPUs that are coming out but also want to continue to grow our EC2 footprint powered by AMD in the long run. >> Fantastic. Well, it sounds like this second showing here on theCUBE is just the tee up for your third and we'll definitely have to have Mike back on for the second time around to hear how things are going. Thank you both so much for taking the time today to join me here. Mike and Ali, it was fantastic getting to chat to you and thank you to our audience for tuning into theCUBE's special coverage of AWS re:Invent. My name's Savannah Peterson and I hope we can learn together soon. (outro upbeat music)

(light hearted music) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud '22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got Ali Ghodsi here, co-founder and CEO of Databricks. Ali, Great to see you. Thanks for spending your valuable time to come on and talk about Supercloud and the future of all the structural change that's happening in cloud computing. >> My pleasure, thanks for having me. >> Well, first of all, congratulations. We've been talking for many, many years, and I still go back to the video that we have in archive, you talking about cloud. And really, at the beginning of the big reboot, I called the post Hadoop, a revitalization of data. Congratulations, you've been cloud-first, now on multiple clouds. Congratulations to you and your team for achieving what looks like a billion dollars in annualized revenue as reported by the Wall Street Journal, so first, congratulations. >> Thank you so much, appreciate it. >> So I was talking to some young developers and I asked a random poll, what do you think about Databricks? Oh, we love those guys, they're AI and ML-native, and that's their advantage over the competition. So I pressed why. I don't think they knew why, but that's an interesting perspective. This idea of cloud native, AI/ML-native, ML Ops, this has been a big trend and it's continuing. This is a big part of how this change and this structural change is happening. How do you react to that? And how do you see Databricks evolving into this new Supercloud-like multi-cloud environment? >> Yeah, look, I think it's a continuum. It starts with having data, but they want to clean it, you know, and they want to get insights out of it. But then, eventually, you'd like to start asking questions, doing reports, maybe ask questions about what was my revenue yesterday, last week, but soon you want to start using the crystal ball, predictive technology. Okay, but what will my revenue be next week? Next quarter? Who's going to churn? And if you can finally automate that completely so that you can act on the predictions, right? So this credit card that got swiped, the AI thinks it's fraud, we're going to deny it. That's when you get real value. So we're trying to help all these organizations move through this data AI maturity curve, all the way to that, the prescriptive, automated AI machine learning. That's when you get real competitive advantage. And you know, we saw that with the fans, right? I mean, Google wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for AI. You know, we'd be using AltaVista or something. We want to help all organizations to be able to leverage data and AI that way that the fans did. >> One of the things we're looking at with supercloud and why we call it supercloud versus other things like multi-cloud is that today a lot of the successful companies have started in the cloud have been successful, but have realized and even enterprises who have gotten by accident, and maybe have done nothing with cloud have just some cloud projects on multiple clouds. So, people have multiple cloud operational things going on but it hasn't necessarily been a strategy per se. It's been more of kind of a default reaction to things but the ones that are innovating have been successful in one native cloud because the use cases that drove that got scale got value, and then they're making that super by bringing it on premise, putting in a modern data stack, for the modern application development, and kind of dealing with the things that you guys are in the middle of with data bricks is that, that is where the action is, and they don't want to go, lose the trajectory in all the economies of scale. So we're seeing another structural change where the evolutionary nature of the cloud has solved a bunch of use cases, but now other use cases are emerging that's on premises and edge that have been driven by applications because of the developer boom, that's happening. You guys are in the middle of it. What is happening with this structural change? Are people looking for the modern data stack? Are they looking for more AI? What's the, what's your perspective on this supercloud kind of position? >> Look, it started with not AR on multiple clouds, right? So multi-cloud has been a thing. It became a thing 70, 80% of our customers when you ask them, they're more than one cloud. But then soon to start realizing that, hey, you know, if I'm on multiple clouds, this data stuff is hard enough as it is. Do I want to redo it again and again with different proprietary technologies, on each of the clouds. And that's when I started thinking about let's standardize this, let's figure out a way which just works across them. That's where I think open source comes in, becomes really important. Hey, can we leverage open standards because then we can make it work in these different environments, as we said so that we can actually go super, as you said, that's one. The second thing is, can we simplify it? You know, and I think today, the data landscape is complicated. Conceptually it's simple. You have data which is essentially customer data that you have, maybe employee data. And you want to get some kind of insights from that. But how you do that is very complicated. You have to buy data warehouse, hire data analysts. You have to buy, store stuff in the Delta Lake you know, get your data engineers. If you want streaming real time thing that's another complete different set of technologies you have to buy. And then you have to stitch all these together, and you have to do again and again on every cloud. So they just want simplification. So that's why we're big believers in this Delta Lakehouse concept. Which is an open standard to simplifying this data stack and help people to just get value out of their data in any environment. So they can do that in this sort of supercloud as you call it. >> You know, we've been talking about that in previous interviews, do the heavy lifting let them get the value. I have to ask you about how you see that going forward, Because if I'm a customer, I have a lot of operational challenges. Cause the developers are are kicking butt right now. We see that clearly. Open sources growing at, and continue to be great. But ops and security teams they really care about this stuff. And most companies don't want to spin up multiple ops teams to deal with different stacks. This is one big problem that I think that's leading into the multi-cloud viability. How do you guys deal with that? How do you talk to customers when they say, I want to have less complications on operations? >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, it's easy for a developer to adopt all these technologies and new things are coming out all the time. The ops teams are the ones that have to make sure this works. Doing that in multiple different environments is super hard. especially when there's a proprietary stack in each environment that's different. So they just want standardization. They want open source, that's super important. We hear that all the time from them. They want open the source technologies. They believe in the communities around it. You know, they know that source code is open. So you can also see if there's issues with it. If there's security breaches, those kind of things that they can have a community around it. So they can actually leverage that. So they're the ones that are really pushing this, and we're seeing it across the board. You know, it starts first with the digital natives you know, the companies that are, but slowly it's also now percolating to the other organizations, we're hearing across the board. >> Where are we, Ali on the innovation strategies for customers? Where are they on the trajectory around how they're building out their teams? How are they looking at the open source? How are they extending the value proposition of Databricks, and data at scale, as they start to build out their teams and operations, because some are like kind of starting, crawl, walk, run, kind of vibe. Some are big companies, they're dealing with data all the time. Where are they in their journey? What's the core issues that they're solving? What are some of the use cases that you see that are most pressing in customer? >> Yeah, what I've seen, that's really exciting about this Delta Lakehouse concept is that we're now seeing a lot of use cases around real time. So real time fraud detection, real time stock ticker pricing, anyone that's doing trading, they want that to work real time. Lots of use cases around that. Lots of use cases around how do we in real time drive more engagement on our web assets if we're a media company, right? We have all these assets how do we get people to get engaged? Stay on our sites. Continue engaging with the material we have. Those are real time use cases. And the interesting thing is, they're real time. So, you know, it's really important that you that now you don't want to recommend someone, hey, you should go check out this restaurant if they just came from that restaurant, half an hour ago. So you want it to be real time, but B, that it's also all based on machine learning. These are a lot of this is trying to predict what you want to see, what you want to do, is it fraudulent? And that's also interesting because basically more and more machine learning is coming in. So that's super exciting to see, the combination of real time and machine learning on the Lakehouse. And finally, I would say the Lakehouse is really important for this because that's where the data is flowing in. If they have to take that data that's flowing into the lake and actually copy it into a separate warehouse, that delays the real time use cases. And then it can't hit those real time deadlines. So that's another catalyst for this Lakehouse pattern. >> Would that be an example of how the metrics are changing? Cause I've been looking at some people saying, well you can tell if someone's doing well there's a lot of data being transferred. And then I was saying, well, wait a minute. Data transfer costs money, right? And time. So this is interesting dynamic, in a way you don't want to have a lot of movement, right? >> Yeah, movement actually decreases for a lot of these real time use cases. 'Cause what we saw in the past was that they would run a batch processing to process all the data. So once they process all the data. But actually if you look at the things that have changed since the data that we have yesterday it's actually not that much. So if you can actually incrementally process it in real time, you can actually reduce the cost of transfers and storage and processing. So that's actually a great point. That's also one of the main things that we're seeing with the use cases, the bill shrinks and the cost goes down, and they can process less. >> Yeah, and it'd be interesting to see how those KPIs evolve into industry metrics down the road around the supercloud of evolution. I got to ask you about the open source concept of data platforms. You guys have been a pioneer in there doing great work, kind of picking the baton off where the Hadoop World left off as Dave Vellante always points out. But if working across clouds is super important. How are you guys looking at the ability to work across the different clouds with data bricks? Are you going to build that abstraction yourself? Does data sharing and model sharing kind of come into play there? How do you see this data bricks capability across the clouds? >> Yeah, I mean, let me start by saying, we just we're big fans of open source. We think that open source is a force in software. That's going to continue for, decades, hundreds of years, and it's going to slowly replace all proprietary code in its way. We saw that, it could do that with the most advanced technology. Windows, you know proprietary operating system, very complicated, got replaced with Linux. So open source can pretty much do anything. And what we're seeing with the Delta Lakehouse is that slowly the open source community is building a replacement for the proprietary data warehouse, Delta Lake, machine learning, real time stack in open source. And we're excited to be part of it. For us, Delta Lake is a very important project that really helps you standardize how you layout your data in the cloud. And when it comes a really important protocol called data sharing, that enables you in a open way actually for the first time ever share large data sets between organizations, but it uses an open protocol. So the great thing about that is you don't need to be a Databricks customer. You don't need to even like Databricks, you just need to use this open source project and you can now securely share data sets between organizations across clouds. And it actually does so really efficiently just one copy of the data. So you don't have to copy it if you're within the same cloud. >> So you're playing the long game on open source. >> Absolutely. I mean, this is a force it's going to be there if if you deny it, before you know it there's going to be, something like Linux, that is going to be a threat to your propriety. >> I totally agree by the way. I was just talking to somebody the other day and they're like hey, the software industry someone made the comment, the software industry, the software industry is open source. There's no more software industry, it's called open source. It's integrations that become interesting. And I was looking at integrations now is really where the action is. And we had a panel with the Clouderati we called it, the people have been around for a long time. And it was called the innovator's dilemma. And one of the comments was it's the integrator's dilemma, not the innovator's dilemma. And this is a big part of this piece of supercloud. Can you share your thoughts on how cloud and integration need to be tightened up to really make it super? >> Actually that's a great point. I think the beauty of this is, look the ecosystem of data today is vast, there's this picture that someone puts together every year of all the different vendors and how they relate, and it gets bigger and bigger and messy and messier. So, we see customers use all kinds of different aspects of what's existing in the ecosystem and they want it to be integrated in whatever you're selling them. And that's where I think the power of open source comes in. Open source, you get integrations that people will do without you having to push it. So us, Databricks as a vendor, we don't have to go tell people please integrate with Databricks. The open source technology that we contribute to, automatically, people are integrating with it. Delta Lake has integrations with lots of different software out there and Databricks as a company doesn't have to push that. So I think open source is also another thing that really helps with the ecosystem integrations. Many of these companies in this data space actually have employees that are full-time dedicated to make sure make sure our software works well with Spark. Make sure our software works well with Delta and they contribute back to that community. And that's the way you get this sort of ecosystem to further sort of flourish. >> Well, I really appreciate your time. And I, my final question for you is, as we're kind of unpack and and kind of shape and frame supercloud for the future, how would you see a roadmap or architecture or outcome for companies that are going to clearly be in the cloud where it's open source is going to be dominating. Integrations has got to be seamless and frictionless. Abstraction layer make things super easy and take away the complexity. What is supercloud to them? What does the outcome look like? How would you define a supercloud environment for an enterprise? >> Yeah, for me, it's the simplification that you get where you standardize an open source. You get your data in one place, in one format in one standardized way, and then you can get your insights from it, without having to buy lots of different idiosyncratic proprietary software from different vendors. That's different in each environment. So it's this slow standardization that's happening. And I think it's going to happen faster than we think. And I think in a couple years it's going to be a requirement that, does your software work on all these different departments? Is it based on open source? Is it using this Delta Lake house pattern? And if it's not, I think they're going to demand it. >> Yeah, I feel like we're close to some sort of defacto standard coming and you guys are a big part of it, once that clicks in, it's going to highly accelerate in the open, and I think it's going to be super valuable. Ali, thank you so much for your time, and congratulations to you and your team. Like we've been following you guys since the beginning. Remember the early days and look how far it's come. And again, you guys are really making a big difference in making a super cool environment out there. Thanks for coming on sharing. >> Thank you so much John. >> Okay, this is supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier stay with more for more coverage and more commentary after this break. (light hearted music)

>>Mm. Welcome back to the cubes. Continuous coverage of A W s reinvent 2021 were running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with A W S and its ecosystem partners. And, of course, special thanks to a M D for supporting this year's editorial coverage at the event we got to live sets we had to remote sets one in Boston, one in Palo Alto. We've got more than 100 guests coming on the programme and we're looking >>deep into >>the next decade of cloud innovation. We're super excited to be joined by Ali Zafar, who is the senior director of platform strategy and operations at Dropbox Ali. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Awesome. It's a pleasure to be here with you, Dave. >>So Hey, what's your day job like at Dropbox? What's your role? >>Got it? Yeah. So I actually oversee the global supply chain at Dropbox. Also all of the capacity planning which entails both our budget and also capacity requirements and Dropbox. And then I also focus on the platform product management side which is basically building our build vs buy and our overall roadmap for our platform in the long run. >>Great. Thank you. So I mean, everybody knows Dropbox, But maybe you can talk a little bit about your business, your mission and how that's evolved. Over the past several years. >>Dropbox is a global collaboration platform, and our mission at Dropbox is to help design a more enlightened way of working. Dropbox has over 700 million registered users and over 550 billion pieces of content. So taking a step back, they've dropbox health. Let's use all of your content. Think of this as videos as music. Even your tax returns allows you to organise all of this content. And then you can share this content with anybody at any time. You can also take Dropbox to work. And actually, it makes you even more productive in the workplace integrating all of your tools seamlessly, also allowing you to collaborate with all of your teams internally and also externally. >>Yeah, so thank you. Uh, when Dropbox was founded, I mean, the cloud was really nascent, right? So it was early days, and so a lot has changed since you know, the mid last decade. And of course, with remote work and hybrid work that had to be a real tailwind to your business. But maybe you could explain your cloud and your hybrid cloud strategy. >>You're spot on Dave. So Dropbox has always been hybrid since its inception in 2000 and seven. And when I say hybrid, I mean, we have our own on prime infrastructure, and then we also leverage Public Cloud. Now, Public cloud still to these days remains absolutely critical for Dropbox to serve all of its customer needs. And when we talk about the decision between public or private, we think about three or four key things. One is the total cost of ownership. Look at the market. We also look at our customer requirements and the latest technology that's available in the market and then any international data storage requirements to make the decision of going towards public or private for that specific use case. >>So what if we could follow up on that? Like maybe you can talk about the key business, these conditions as a as a SAS storage provider? What are the real drivers in in your business framework? >>Got it at the end of the day, what really matters for us. There is to actually think about our customers and delight them And what better than to focus on performance, reliability and also security. Right. So we want to make sure that the infrastructure that we have today allows Dropbox to actually solve for the specific use case for our customers. What do they care about while also doing this in a very efficient management Manage, uh, way So to summarise that looking at performance, looking at liability, looking at scalability, looking at efficiency and then also compliance >>So that leads me to My next question is about the EC two instances that you use. I know you. You make heavy use of AMG compute. How >>did you >>come to that decision? Was that these factors was all performance. How did you migrate to really enable that capability? How complex was that? >>MD has has been a key strategic partners the partnership as well over 4 to 5 years right now and we've been leveraging them on our on prem infrastructure for compute. So we've always had aimed in our infrastructure. And when the time came where aws was also leveraging some of the MD instances, we wanted to see how we can expand the partnership with AMG and A W S and also experiment with these instances. So we looked at some of the tooling updates that were required. We also looked at specific instances which are either compute optimised and memory optimised instances. And then we actually build our footprint on M D. And what we saw is that the overall performance improvements and also cost improvements that we got for specific workloads. It was actually extremely, uh, overall awesome results for Dropbox and our customers, and we have been using them ever since. >>What kind of business impact did that make that make a difference to your business? That was noticeable >>on the business side, I think primarily it was more on the TCO side, which is where we got most of the benefits on the cost side. Um, and then also for some of our internal work clothes, we also saw benefit, uh, to our internal developers that are using some of those work clothes. >>Well, so you guys have kind of become the poster child for hybrid. A lot has been talked about about you all, but I wonder if you could help us understand what part of your infrastructure is going to be better served by public cloud versus kind of doing your own. I t on Prem. What are some of the value drivers that are that are making, you know, push workloads into the public cloud? Help us understand that better and squint through that >>got ready. I get asked that question a lot. So public cloud in general allows for faster go to market, Think about this as, like product launches teacher launches also international expansion. It allows us to scale and then also leveraging some of the existing technologies out there in the market for some of the common workloads. So just, you know, taking a step back and thinking about Dropbox. We keep on evaluating also the criteria and then also specific workloads on what makes sense on private or public load. And a W s had some instances, like as three rds and EC to that when we started looking at, we knew that some of our key services, like data platform, some parts of our, um, Melania and even paper platform would make more sense for us to actually leverage. Uh, some of these in public cloud for that. >>So what are the sort of characteristics of the workload that are sort of better suited to be in AWS? You know, what's the ideal workload profile? You know, we talk about ideal customer profile. What's the ideal workload profile for the for the AWS Cloud. >>Got it. So the way we think about it, at least we call it the rule of three at Dropbox. Um, and that means we look at scale. First, we look at technology and innovation. Um, and what I mean by that is, is there faster innovation in the public cloud? And is the workload common enough that there's already a lot of work going on in public Cloud? Then there's no reason for us to actually innovate faster than that. We probably can't. And if the scale is not large enough, right? So when we talk about our storage side like magic pocket, the scale is large enough. We're innovating. There makes sense, and it's better for the end customer, so we will probably go towards private cloud there. But then, when we talk about like international expansion, when we talk about, like, faster go to market or some of the innovation in the space. It really makes sense to use public Cloud because of all of the advancements that we've seen there. >>Yeah, so let me circle back to the sort of business benefits and impact of the sort of a MD based compute specifically. But you talked about TCO before. So there's certain things you mentioned on Prem you sometimes use You mean right. If the thing is hardened, you don't want to necessarily rip and replace it. But if you can accelerate, go to market and you spin up things in the cloud that makes sense. You mentioned customer requirements. So that's just kind of depends. And then the international expansion and scale. So it kind of comes down to those whatever. Four or five factors, right? Tco those other factors that I mentioned kind of the high level benefits, if you could, wouldn't mind summarising for us. Ali. >>Yeah, I think you're spot on there. So it's looking at the overall Decio, right? The cost of serving the overall cloud looking at like go to market in general, like can we leverage public cloud and go to market faster? Obviously, meeting that end customer requirements. We also looked at like international expansion, like any of the customer's data that is stored outside of the US is all on public load for Dropbox. Uh, no plans in the short term to do something different there, Um and then also just looking at, like I mentioned anything in the technology space that is ongoing, that we can leverage features side or the product side for our customers, like at Yale or, uh, VRML. We are going to leverage Public cloud there. >>So of course you know we've we've followed the progression of semiconductor technology for decades. This industry has marched to the cadence of performance improvements. What are the one of the futures hold from a technology roadmap standpoint, particularly as it relates to leveraging AMG EC Two instances, Ali >>got it. So drop boxes in a very unique position where we actually leverage AMG both on Prem and for public le leveraging some of the AWS EC two instances like like you mentioned and epic processors from MDR what we're using today, both on the hybrid infrastructure site and the performance and also the d. C o benefits are real and something that we are observing on a day to day basis. So we are gonna be leveraging that technology even in the future. Um, and the partnership with the MD continues to be very, very strong for Dropbox. >>Well, I really, really appreciate you coming on the cube as part of our coverage is great to have You love to have you back sometime. >>Awesome. Thank you. And also just last thing we wanted to also call out that we are also going to be experimenting with probably Milan that is coming out. Uh, room is the current process is from a m D. That we have been leveraging. And as Milan comes available, we do wanna continue to evaluate it and see how we can fit it in our infrastructure. >>Okay, So their their generations are city based, the all Italian city based. They were going to run out of cities soon. >>God, uh, again, the partnership with both A W s and an M. D is something that I'm very proud of. Execution. Thank you, Dave. >>Great to have you, Ali. And really appreciate you watching. Keep it right there for more action on the cube. Your leader in hybrid tech event coverage. Mhm.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to "The Cube's" continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We're running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. And of course, special thanks to AMD for supporting this year's editorial coverage at the event. We got two live sets. We had two remote sets, one in Boston and one in Palo Alto. We got more than 100 guests coming on the program, and we're looking deep into the next decade of cloud innovation. We're super excited to be joined by Ali Zafar, who's the senior director of platform strategy and operations at Dropbox. Ali, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Awesome, it's a pleasure to be here with you, Dave. >> So hey, what's your day job like at Dropbox and what's your role? >> Got it. So I actually oversee the global supply chain at Dropbox. Also all of the capacity planning, which entails both our budget and also capacity requirements at Dropbox. And then I also focus on the platform product management side, which is basically building our build versus buy and our overall roadmap for our platform in the long run. >> Great, thank you. So, everybody knows Dropbox, but maybe you could talk a little bit about your business, your mission, and how that's evolved over the past several years. >> Got it. So Dropbox is a global collaboration platform and our mission at Dropbox is to help design a more enlightened way of working. Dropbox has over 700 million registered users and over 550 billion pieces of content. So taking a step back Dave, Dropbox helps with all of your content. Think of this as videos as music, even your tax returns, allows you to organize all of this content and then you can share this content with anybody at any time. You can also take Dropbox to work and actually it makes you even more productive in the workplace. Integrating all of your tools seamlessly, also allowing you to collaborate with all of your teams internally and also externally. >> Thank you, Ali. When Dropbox was founded, the cloud was really nascent, right? So it was early days, and so a lot has changed since the mid last decade. And of course with remote work and hybrid work, that's had to be a real tailwind to your business, but maybe you could explain your cloud and your hybrid cloud strategy. >> Got it, you're spot on Dave. So Dropbox has always been hybrid since its inception in 2007. And when I say hybrid, I mean we have our own on-prem infrastructure and then we also leverage public cloud. Now public cloud still to these days, remains absolutely critical for Dropbox to serve all of its customer needs. And when we talk about the decision between public or private, we think about three or four key things. One is the total cost of ownership, we look at go-to-market, we also look at our customer requirements and the latest technology that's available in the market. And then any international data storage requirements to make the decision of going towards public or private for that specific use case. >> So, I wonder if we could follow up on that. Maybe you could talk about the key business considerations as an SAS storage provider. What are the real drivers and in your business framework? >> Got it. At the end of the day, what really matters for us Dave, is to actually think about our customers and delight them. And what better than to focus on performance, reliability and also security, right? So we want to make sure that the infrastructure that we have today, allows Dropbox to actually solve for this specific use case for our customers. You know, what do they care about? While also doing this in a very efficient, managed way. So to summarize that, looking at performance, looking at liability, looking at scalability, looking at efficiency, and then also compliance. >> So that leads me to my next question, is about the EC2 instances that you use. I know you make heavy use of AMD compute. How did you come to that decision? Was it these factors? Was it all performance? How did you migrate to really enable that capability? How complex was that? >> Got it. So AMD has always been our key strategic partners partners. The partnership is well over four to five years right now, and we've been leveraging them on our on-prem infrastructure for compute. So we've always had AMD in our infrastructure and when the time came where AWS was also leveraging some of the AMD instances, we wanted to see how we can expand the partnership with AMD and AWS and also experiment with these instances. So we looked at some of the tooling updates that were required. We also looked at specific instances, which are either compute optimized and memory optimized instances, and then we actually built our footprint on AMD. And what we saw is that the overall performance improvement and also cost improvements that we got per specific workloads was actually extremely, was overall awesome results for Dropbox and our end customers. And we have been using them ever since. >> What kind of business impact did that make? Did it make a difference to your business that was noticeable? >> On the business side, I think primarily it was more on the TCO side, which is where we got most of the benefits on the cost side. And then also for some of our internal workloads, we also saw benefit to our internal developers that are using some of those workloads. >> So, you guys have become the poster child for hybrid and a lot has been talked about about you all, but I wonder if you could help us understand what part of your infrastructure is going to be better served by public cloud versus doing your own I T on-prem. What are some of the value drivers that are making you push workloads into the public cloud? Help us understand that better and squint through that. >> Got it, I get asked that question a lot. So public cloud in general allows for faster go-to-market. Think about this as like product launches, feature launches, also international expansion. It allows us to scale and then also leveraging some of the existing technologies out there in the market for some of the common workloads. So just taking a step back and thinking about Dropbox, we keep on evaluating also the criteria and then also specific workloads on what makes sense on private or public cloud. And AWS had some instances like S3 RDS and EC2 that when we started looking at, we knew that some of our key services like data platform, some parts of the MLN A I, and even paper platform would make more sense for us to actually leverage some of these in a public cloud for that. >> So what are the characteristics of the workload that are better suited to be an AWS? What's the ideal workload profile? You know, we talk about ideal customer profile. What's the ideal workload profile for the AWS cloud? >> Got it, so the way we think about it, at least, we call it the rule of three at Dropbox. And that means we look at scale first, we look at technology and innovation and what I mean by that is, is there a faster innovation in the public cloud and is that workload common enough that there's already a lot of work going on in public cloud, then there's no reason for us to actually innovate faster than that, we probably can't. And if the scale is not large enough. So when we talk about our storage side, like magic pocket, the scale is large enough where innovating there makes sense and it's better for the end customer. So we would probably go towards private cloud there. But then when we talk about international expansion, when we talk about faster go-to-market or some of the innovation in the MLN A I space, it really makes sense to use public cloud because of all of the advancements that we've seen there. >> So let me circle back to the business benefits and impact of the AMD based compute specifically, but you talked about TCO before, so there's certain things you mentioned on-prem you sometimes use. If the thing's hardened, you don't want to necessarily rip and replace it, but if you can accelerate go-to-market and you spin up things in the cloud, that makes sense. You mentioned customer requirements, so that just kind of depends. And then the international expansion and scale. So it comes down to those whatever four or five factors, right? The TCO, those other factors that I mentioned. Kind of the high level benefits, if you wouldn't mind summarizing for us, Ali. >> Yeah, I think you're spot on there. So there's looking at the overall TCO, right? The cost of serving the overall cloud, looking at go-to-market in general, can we leverage public cloud and go-to-market faster, obviously meeting our end customer requirements. We also looked at international expansion, any of the customer's data that is stored outside of the U S is all on public cloud for Dropbox. No plans in the short term to do something different there. And then also just looking at, like I mentioned, anything in the technology space that is ongoing, that we can leverage feature side or the product side for our customers, like A I or M L, we are going to leverage public cloud there. >> So of course you know, we've followed the progression of semiconductor technology for decades. This industry is marched to the cadence of performance improvements. What do the futures hold from a technology roadmap standpoint, and particularly as it relates to leveraging AMD EC2 instances, Ali? >> Got it. So Dropbox is in a very unique position where we actually leverage AMD both on-prem and for public cloud, leveraging some of the AWS EC2 instances like you mentioned. And EPYC processors from AMD are what we're using today, both on the hybrid infrastructure side and the performance. And also the TCO benefits are real and something that we are observing on a day-to-day basis. So we are going to be leveraging that technology even in the future, and the partnership with the AMD continues to be very, very strong for Dropbox. >> Well, Ali, I really appreciate you coming on "The Cube" as part of our coverage. It's great to have you. Love to have you back sometime. >> Awesome, thank you. And also just last thing we wanted to also call out that we are also going to be experimenting with probably Milan that is coming out. Rome is the current processors from AMD that we have been leveraging and as Milan comes available, we do want to continue to evaluate it and see how we can fit it in our infrastructure. >> So their are generations are city-based. Are they all Italian city-based, or are we going to run out of cities soon? (both laughing) >> Got it. Again, the partnership with both AWS and AMD is something that I'm very proud of. >> Excellent. >> Thank you so much. Thank you, Dave. >> Great to have you Ali, and really appreciate you watching. Keep it right there for more action on "The Cube", your leader in hybrid tech event coverage. (calm music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to "The Cube's" continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We're running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. And of course, special thanks to AMD for supporting this year's editorial coverage at the event. We got two live sets. We had two remote sets, one in Boston and one in Palo Alto. We got more than 100 guests coming on the program, and we're looking deep into the next decade of cloud innovation. We're super excited to be joined by Ali Zafar, who's the senior director of platform strategy and operations at Dropbox. Ali, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Awesome, it's a pleasure to be here with you, Dave. >> So hey, what's your day job like at Dropbox and what's your role? >> Got it. So I actually oversee the global supply chain at Dropbox. Also all of the capacity planning, which entails both our budget and also capacity requirements at Dropbox. And then I also focus on the platform product management side, which is basically building our build versus buy and our overall roadmap for our platform in the long run. >> Great, thank you. So, everybody knows Dropbox, but maybe you could talk a little bit about your business, your mission, and how that's evolved over the past several years. >> Got it. So Dropbox is a global collaboration platform and our mission at Dropbox is to help design a more enlightened way of working. Dropbox has over 700 million registered users and over 550 billion pieces of content. So taking a step back Dave, Dropbox helps with all of your content. Think of this as videos as music, even your tax returns, allows you to organize all of this content and then you can share this content with anybody at any time. You can also take Dropbox to work and actually it makes you even more productive in the workplace. Integrating all of your tools seamlessly, also allowing you to collaborate with all of your teams internally and also externally. >> Thank you, Ali. When Dropbox was founded, the cloud was really nascent, right? So it was early days, and so a lot has changed since the mid last decade. And of course with remote work and hybrid work, that's had to be a real tailwind to your business, but maybe you could explain your cloud and your hybrid cloud strategy. >> Got it, you're spot on Dave. So Dropbox has always been hybrid since its inception in 2007. And when I say hybrid, I mean we have our own on-prem infrastructure and then we also leverage public cloud. Now public cloud still to these days, remains absolutely critical for Dropbox to serve all of its customer needs. And when we talk about the decision between public or private, we think about three or four key things. One is the total cost of ownership, we look at go-to-market, we also look at our customer requirements and the latest technology that's available in the market. And then any international data storage requirements to make the decision of going towards public or private for that specific use case. >> So, I wonder if we could follow up on that. Maybe you could talk about the key business considerations as an SAS storage provider. What are the real drivers and in your business framework? >> Got it. At the end of the day, what really matters for us Dave, is to actually think about our customers and delight them. And what better than to focus on performance, reliability and also security, right? So we want to make sure that the infrastructure that we have today, allows Dropbox to actually solve for this specific use case for our customers. You know, what do they care about? While also doing this in a very efficient, managed way. So to summarize that, looking at performance, looking at liability, looking at scalability, looking at efficiency, and then also compliance. >> So that leads me to my next question, is about the EC2 instances that you use. I know you make heavy use of AMD compute. How did you come to that decision? Was it these factors? Was it all performance? How did you migrate to really enable that capability? How complex was that? >> Got it. So AMD has always been our key strategic partners partners. The partnership is well over four to five years right now, and we've been leveraging them on our on-prem infrastructure for compute. So we've always had AMD in our infrastructure and when the time came where AWS was also leveraging some of the AMD instances, we wanted to see how we can expand the partnership with AMD and AWS and also experiment with these instances. So we looked at some of the tooling updates that were required. We also looked at specific instances, which are either compute optimized and memory optimized instances, and then we actually built our footprint on AMD. And what we saw is that the overall performance improvement and also cost improvements that we got per specific workloads was actually extremely, was overall awesome results for Dropbox and our end customers. And we have been using them ever since. >> What kind of business impact did that make? Did it make a difference to your business that was noticeable? >> On the business side, I think primarily it was more on the TCO side, which is where we got most of the benefits on the cost side. And then also for some of our internal workloads, we also saw benefit to our internal developers that are using some of those workloads. >> So, you guys have become the poster child for hybrid and a lot has been talked about about you all, but I wonder if you could help us understand what part of your infrastructure is going to be better served by public cloud versus doing your own I T on-prem. What are some of the value drivers that are making you push workloads into the public cloud? Help us understand that better and squint through that. >> Got it, I get asked that question a lot. So public cloud in general allows for faster go-to-market. Think about this as like product launches, feature launches, also international expansion. It allows us to scale and then also leveraging some of the existing technologies out there in the market for some of the common workloads. So just taking a step back and thinking about Dropbox, we keep on evaluating also the criteria and then also specific workloads on what makes sense on private or public cloud. And AWS had some instances like S3 RDS and EC2 that when we started looking at, we knew that some of our key services like data platform, some parts of the MLN A I, and even paper platform would make more sense for us to actually leverage some of these in a public cloud for that. >> So what are the characteristics of the workload that are better suited to be an AWS? What's the ideal workload profile? You know, we talk about ideal customer profile. What's the ideal workload profile for the AWS cloud? >> Got it, so the way we think about it, at least, we call it the rule of three at Dropbox. And that means we look at scale first, we look at technology and innovation and what I mean by that is, is there a faster innovation in the public cloud and is that workload common enough that there's already a lot of work going on in public cloud, then there's no reason for us to actually innovate faster than that, we probably can't. And if the scale is not large enough. So when we talk about our storage side, like magic pocket, the scale is large enough where innovating there makes sense and it's better for the end customer. So we would probably go towards private cloud there. But then when we talk about international expansion, when we talk about faster go-to-market or some of the innovation in the MLN A I space, it really makes sense to use public cloud because of all of the advancements that we've seen there. >> So let me circle back to the business benefits and impact of the AMD based compute specifically, but you talked about TCO before, so there's certain things you mentioned on-prem you sometimes use. If the thing's hardened, you don't want to necessarily rip and replace it, but if you can accelerate go-to-market and you spin up things in the cloud, that makes sense. You mentioned customer requirements, so that just kind of depends. And then the international expansion and scale. So it comes down to those whatever four or five factors, right? The TCO, those other factors that I mentioned. Kind of the high level benefits, if you wouldn't mind summarizing for us, Ali. >> Yeah, I think you're spot on there. So there's looking at the overall TCO, right? The cost of serving the overall cloud, looking at go-to-market in general, can we leverage public cloud and go-to-market faster, obviously meeting our end customer requirements. We also looked at international expansion, any of the customer's data that is stored outside of the U S is all on public cloud for Dropbox. No plans in the short term to do something different there. And then also just looking at, like I mentioned, anything in the technology space that is ongoing, that we can leverage feature side or the product side for our customers, like A I or M L, we are going to leverage public cloud there. >> So of course you know, we've followed the progression of semiconductor technology for decades. This industry is marched to the cadence of performance improvements. What do the futures hold from a technology roadmap standpoint, and particularly as it relates to leveraging AMD EC2 instances, Ali? >> Got it. So Dropbox is in a very unique position where we actually leverage AMD both on-prem and for public cloud, leveraging some of the AWS EC2 instances like you mentioned. And EPYC processors from AMD are what we're using today, both on the hybrid infrastructure side and the performance. And also the TCO benefits are real and something that we are observing on a day-to-day basis. So we are going to be leveraging that technology even in the future, and the partnership with the AMD continues to be very, very strong for Dropbox. >> Well, Ali, I really appreciate you coming on "The Cube" as part of our coverage. It's great to have you. Love to have you back sometime. >> Awesome, thank you. And also just last thing we wanted to also call out that we are also going to be experimenting with probably Milan that is coming out. Rome is the current processors from AMD that we have been leveraging and as Milan comes available, we do want to continue to evaluate it and see how we can fit it in our infrastructure. >> So their are generations are city-based. Are they all Italian city-based, or are we going to run out of cities soon? (both laughing) >> Got it. Again, the partnership with both AWS and AMD is something that I'm very proud of. >> Excellent. >> Thank you so much. Thank you, Dave. >> Great to have you Ali, and really appreciate you watching. Keep it right there for more action on "The Cube", your leader in hybrid tech event coverage. (calm music)

>> Announcer: From around the Globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of Kube Con and Cloud Native Con Europe 2021 virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Kube Con and Cloud Native Con 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here with a great guest, I'm excited to talk to. His company, that he was part of founding CTO, was bought by Red Hat. Ali Golshan, Senior Director of Global Software Engineer at Red Hat, formerly CTO of StackRox. Ali thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me excited to be here. >> So big acquisition in January, where we covered it on SiliconANGLE, You guys, security company, venture backed amplify Sequoya and on and on. Big part of Red Hat story in their security as developers want to shift left as they say and as more and more modern applications are being developed. So congratulations. So real quick, just quick highlight of what you guys do as a company and inside Red Hat. >> Sure, so the company's premise was built around how do you bring security the entire application life cycle. So StackRox focuses on sort of three big areas that we talk about. One is, how do you secure the supply chain? The second part of it is, how do you secure infrastructure and foster management and then the third part is now, how do you protect the workload that run on top of that infrastructure. So this is the part that aligned really well with Red Hat which is, Red Hat had wanted to take a lot of what we do around infrastructure, foster management configuration management and developer tools integrated into a lot of the things they do and obviously the workload protection part was a very seamless part of integrating us into the OpenShift part because we were built around cloud native constructs and obviously Red Hat having some of the foremost experts around cloud native sort of created a really great asset. >> Yeah, you guys got a great story. Obviously cloud native applications are rocking and rolling. You guys were in early serverless emerges, Kubernetes and then security in what I call the real time developer workflow. Ones that are building really fast, pushing code. Now it's called day two operations. So cloud native did two operations kind of encapsulates this new environment. You guys were right in the sweet spot of that. So this became quite the big deal, Red Hat saw an opportunity to bring you in. What was the motivation when you guys did the deal Was it like, "wow" this is a good fit. How did you react? What was the vibe at the StackRox when this was all going down? >> Yeah, so I think there's really three areas you look for, anytime a company comes up and sort of starts knocking on your door. One is really, is the team going to be the right fit? Is the culture going to be the right environment for the people? For us, that was a big part of what we were taking into consideration. We found Red Hat's general culture, how they approach people and sort of the overall approach the community was very much aligned with what we were trying to do. The second part of it was really the product fit. So we had from very early on started to focus purely on the Kubernetes components and doing everything we could, we call it sort of our product approach built in versus bolted on and this is sort of a philosophy that Red Hat had adopted for a long time and it's a part of a lot of their developer tools, part of their shift left story as well as part of OpenShift. And then the third part of it was really the larger strategy of how do you go to market. So we were hitting that point where we were in triple digit customers and we were thinking about scalability and how to scale the company. And that was the part that also fit really well which was obviously, RedHat more and more hearing from their customers about the importance and the criticality of security. So that last part happened to be one part. We ended up spending a lot of time on it, ended up being sort of three out of three matches that made this acquisition happen. >> Well congratulations, always great to see startups in the right position. Good hustle, great product, great market. You guys did a great job, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Now, the big news here at KubeCon as Linux foundation open-source, you guys are announcing that you're open-sourcing at StackRox, this is huge news, obviously, you now work for an open-source company and so that was probably a part of it. Take us through the news, this is the top story here for this segment tickets through open-source. Take us through the news. >> Yeah, so traditionally StackRox was a proprietary tool. We do have open-source tooling but the entire platform in itself was a proprietary tool. This has been a number of discussions that we've had with the Red Hat team from the very beginning. And it sort of aligns around a couple of core philosophies. One is obviously Red Hat at its core being an open-source company and being very much plugged into the community and working with users and developers and engineers to be able to sort of get feedback and build better products. But I think the other part of it is that, I think a lot of us from a historic standpoint have viewed security to be a proprietary thing as we've always viewed the sort of magic algorithms or black boxes or some magic under the hood that really moved the needle. And that happens not to be the case anymore also because StackRox's philosophy was really built around Kubernetes and Built-in, we feel like one of the really great messages around wide open-source of security product is to build that trust with the community being able to expose, here's how the product works, here's how it integrates here are the actions it takes here's the ramifications or repercussions of some of the decisions you may make in the product. Those all I feel make for very good stories of how you build connection, trust and communication with the community and actually get feedback on it. And obviously at its core, the company being very much focused on Kubernetes developer tools, service manage, these are all open-source toolings obviously. So, for us it was very important to sort of talk the talk and walk the walk and this is sort of an easy decision at the end of the day for us to take the platform open-source. And we're excited about it because I think most still want a productized supported commercial product. So while it's great to have some of the tip of the spear customers look at it and adopt the open-source and be able to drive it themselves. We're still hearing from a lot of the customers that what they do want is really that support and that continuous management, maintenance and improvement around the product. So we're actually pretty excited. We think it's only going to increase our velocity and momentum into the community. >> Well, I got some questions on how it's going to work but I do want to get your comment because I think this is a pretty big deal. I had a conversation about 10 years ago with Doug Cutting, who was the founder of Hadoop, And he was telling me a story about a company he worked for, you know all this coding, they went under and the IP was gone, the software was gone and it was a story to highlight that proprietary software sometimes can never see the light of day and it doesn't continue. Here, you guys are going to continue the story, continue the code. How does that feel? What's your expectations? How's that going to work? I'm assuming that's what you're going to open it up which means that anyone can download the code. Is that right? Take us through how to first of all, do you agree with that this is going to stay alive and how's it going to work? >> Yeah, I mean, I think as a founder one of the most fulfilling things to have is something you build that becomes sustainable and stands the test of time. And I think, especially in today's world open-source is a tool that is in demand and only in a market that's growing is really a great way to do that. Especially if you have a sort of an established user base and the customer base. And then to sort of back that on top of thousands of customers and users that come with Red Hat in itself, gives us a lot of confidence that that's going to continue and only grow further. So the decision wasn't a difficult one, although transparently, I feel like even if we had pushed back I think Red Hat was pretty determined about open-source and we get anyway, but it's to say that we actually were in agreement to be able to go down that path. I do think that there's a lot of details to be worked out because obviously there's sort of a lot of the nuances in how you build product and manage it and maintain it and then, how do you introduce community feedback and community collaboration as part of open-source projects is another big part of it. I think the part we're really excited about is, is that it's very important to have really good community engagement, maintenance and response. And for us, even though we actually discussed this particular strategy during StackRox, one of the hindering aspects of that was really the resources required to be able to manage and maintain such a massive open-source project. So having Red Hat behind us and having a lot of this experience was very relevant. I think, as a, as a startup to start proprietary and suddenly open it and try to change your entire business model or go to market strategy commercialization, changed the entire culture of the company can sometimes create a lot of headwind. And as a startup, like sort of I feel like every year just trying not to die until you create that escape velocity. So those were I think some of the risk items that Red Hat was able to remove for us and as a result made the decision that much easier. >> Yeah, and you got the mothership with Red Hat they've done it before, they've been doing it for generations. You guys, you're in the startup, things are going crazy. It's like whitewater rafting, it's like everything's happening so fast. And now you got the community behind you cause you're going to have the CNC if you get Kubecon. I mean, it's a pretty great community, the support is amazing. I think the only thing the engineers might want to worry about is go back into the code base and clean things up a bit, as you start to see the code I'm like, wait a minute, their names are on it. So, it's always always a fun time and all serious now this is a big story on the DevSecOps. And I want to get your thoughts on this because kubernetes is still emerging, and DevOps is awesome, we've been covering that in for all of the life of theCUBE for the 11 years now and the greatness of DevOps but now DevSecOps is critical and Kubernetes native security is what people are looking at. When you look at that trend only continuing, what's your focus? What do you see? Now that you're in Red Hat as the CTO, former CTO of StackRox and now part of the Red Hat it's going to get bigger and stronger Kubernetes native and shifting left-hand or DevSecOps. What's your focus? >> Yeah, so I would say our focus is really around two big buckets. One is, Kubernetes native, sort of a different way to think about it as we think about our roadmap planning and go-to-market strategy is it's mutually exclusive with being in infrastructure native, that's how we think about it and as a startup we really have to focus on an area and Kubernetes was a great place for us to focus on because it was becoming the dominant orchestration engine. Now that we have the resources and the power of Red Hat behind us, the way we're thinking about this is infrastructure native. So, thinking about cloud native infrastructure where you're using composable, reusable, constructs and objects, how do you build potential offerings or features or security components that don't rely on third party tools or components anymore? How do you leverage the existing infrastructure itself to be able to conduct some of these traditional use cases? And one example we use for this particular scenario is networking. Networking, the way firewalling in segmentation was typically done was, people would tweak IP tables or they would install, for example, a proxy or a container that would terminate MTLS or become inline and it would create all sorts of sort of operational and risk overhead for users and for customers. And one of the things we're really proud of as sort of the company that pioneered this notion of cloud native security is if you just leverage network policies in Kubernetes, you don't have to be inline you don't have to have additional privileges, you don't have to create additional risks or operational overhead for users. So we're taking those sort of core philosophies and extending them. The same way we did to Kubernetes all the way through service manager, we're doing the same sorts of things Istio being able to do a lot of the things people are traditionally doing through for example, proxies through layer six and seven, we want to do through Istio. And then the same way for example, we introduced a product called GoDBledger which was an open-source tool, which would basically look at a yaml on helm charts and give you best practices responses. And it's something you we want for example to your get repositories. We want to take those sort of principles, enabling developers, giving them feedback, allowing them not to break their existing workflows and leveraging components in existing infrastructure to be able to sort of push security into cloud native. And really the two pillars we look at are ensuring we can get users and customers up and running as quickly as possible and reduce as much as possible operational overhead for them over time. So we feel these two are really at the core of open-sourcing in building into the infrastructure, which has sort of given us momentum over the last six years and we feel pretty confident with Red Hat's help we can even expand that further. >> Yeah, I mean, you bring up a good point and it's certainly as you get more scale with Red Hat and then the customer base, not only in dealing with the threat detection around containers and cloud native applications, you got to kind of build into the life cycle and you've got to figure out, okay, it's not just Kubernetes anymore, it's something else. And you've got advanced cluster security with Red Hat they got OpenShift cloud platform, you're going to have managed services so this means you're going to have scale, right? So, how do you view that? Because now you're going to have, you guys at the center of the advanced cluster security paradigm for Red Hat. That's a big deal for them and they've got a lot of R and D and a lot of, I wouldn't say R and D, but they got emerging technologies developing around that. We covered that in depth. So when you start to get into advanced cluster, it's compliance too, it's not just threat detection. You got insights telemetry, data acquisition, so you have to kind of be part of that now. How do you guys feel about that? Are you up for the task? >> Yeah, I hope so it's early days but we feel pretty confident about it, we have a very good team. So as part of the advanced cluster security we work also very closely with the advanced cluster management team in Red Hat because it's not just about security, it's about, how do you operationalize it, how do you manage it and maintain it and to your point sort of run it longterm at scale. The compliance part of it is a very important part. I still feel like that's in its infancy and these are a lot of conversations we're having internally at Red Hat, which is, we all feel that compliance is going to sort of more from the standard benchmarks you have from CIS or particular compliance requirements like the power, of PCI or Nest into how do you create more flexible and composable policies through a unified language that allows you to be able to create more custom or more useful things specific to your business? So this is actually, an area we're doing a lot of collaboration with the advanced cluster management team which is in that, how do you sort of bring to light a really easy way for customers to be able to describe and sort of abstract policies and then at the same time be able to actually and enforce them. So we think that's really the next key point of what we have to accomplish to be able to sort of not only gain scale, but to be able to take this notion of, not only detection in response but be able to actually build in what we call declarative security into your infrastructure. And what that means is, is to be able to really dictate how you want your applications, your services, your infrastructure to be configured and run and then anything that is sort of conflicting with that is auto responded to and I think that's really the larger vision that with Red Hat, we're trying to accomplish. >> And that's a nice posture to have you build it in, get it built in, you have the declarative models then you kind of go from there and then let the automation kick in. You got insights coming in from Red Hat. So all these things are kind of evolving. It's still early days and I think it was a nice move by Red Hat, so congratulations. Final question for you is, as you prepare to go to the next generation KubeCon is also seeing a lot more end user participation, people, you know, cloud native is going mainstream, when I say mainstream, seeing beyond the hyperscalers in the early adopters, Kubernetes and other infrastructure control planes are coming in you start to see the platforms emerge. Nobody wants another security tool, they want platforms that enable applications handle tools. As it gets more complicated, what's going to be the easy button in security cloud native? What's the approach? What's your vision on what's next? >> Yeah so, I don't know if there is an easy button in security and I think part of it is that there's just such a fragmentation and use cases and sort of designs and infrastructure that doesn't exist, especially if you're dealing with such a complex stack. And not only just a complex stack but a potentially use cases that not only span runtime but they deal with you deployment annual development life cycle. So the way we think about it is more sort of this notion that has been around for a long time which is the shared responsibility model. Security is not security's job anymore. Especially, because security teams probably cannot really keep up with the learning curve. Like they have to understand containers then they have to understand Kubernetes and Istio and Envoy and cloud platforms and APIs. and there's just too much happening. So the way we think about it is if you deal with security a in a declarative version and if you can state things in a way where how infrastructure is ran is properly configured. So it's more about safety than security. Then what you can do is push a lot of these best practices back as part of your gift process. Involve developers, engineers, the right product security team that are responsible for day-to-day managing and maintaining this. And the example we think about is, is like CVEs. There are plenty of, for example, vulnerability tools but the CVEs are still an unsolved problem because, where are they, what is the impact? Are they actually running? Are they being exploited in the wild? And all these things have different ramifications as you span it across the life cycle. So for us, it's understanding context, understanding assets ensuring how the infrastructure has to handle that asset and then ensuring that the route for that response is sent to the right team, so they can address it properly. And I think that's really our larger vision is how can you automate this entire life cycle? So, the information is routed to the right teams, the right teams are appending it to the application and in the future, our goal is not to just pardon the workload or the compute environment, but use this information to action pardon application themselves and that creates that additional agility and scalability. >> Yeah it's in the lifecycle of that built in right from the beginning, more productivity, more security and then, letting everything take over on the automation side. Ali congratulations on the acquisition deal with Red Hat, buyout that was great for them and for you guys. Take a minute to just quickly answer final final question for the folks watching here. The big news is you're open-sourcing StackRox, so that's a big news here at KubeCon. What can people do to get involved? Well, just share a quick quick commercial for what people can do to get involved? What are you guys looking for? Take a pledge to the community? >> Yeah, I mean, what we're looking for is more involvement in direct feedback from our community, from our users, from our customers. So there's a number, obviously the StackRox platform itself being open-source, we have other open-source tools like the KubeLinter. What we're looking for is feedback from users as to what are the pain points that they're trying to solve for. And then give us feedback as to how we're not addressing those or how can we better design our systems? I mean, this is the sort of feedback we're looking for and naturally with more resources, we can be a lot faster in response. So send us feedback good or bad. We would love to hear it from our users and our customers and get a better sense of what they're looking for. >> Innovation out in the open love it, got to love open-source going next gen, Ali Golshan Senior Director of Global Software Engineering the new title at Red Hat former CTO and founder of StackRox which spread had acquired in January, 2021. Ali thanks for coming on congratulations. >> Thanks for having, >> Okay, so keeps coverage of Kube Con cloud native Con 2021. I'm John Furrie, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From around the Globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of Kube Con and Cloud Native Con Europe 2021 virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Kube Con and Cloud Native Con 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here with a great guest, I'm excited to talk to. His company, that he was part of founding CTO, was bought by Red Hat. Ali Golshan, Senior Director of Global Software Engineer at Red Hat, formerly CTO of StackRox. Ali thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me excited to be here. >> So big acquisition in January, where we covered it on SiliconANGLE, You guys, security company, venture backed amplify Sequoya and on and on. Big part of Red Hat story in their security as developers want to shift left as they say and as more and more modern applications are being developed. So congratulations. So real quick, just quick highlight of what you guys do as a company and inside Red Hat. >> Sure, so the company's premise was built around how do you bring security the entire application life cycle. So StackRox focuses on sort of three big areas that we talk about. One is, how do you secure the supply chain? The second part of it is, how do you secure infrastructure and foster management and then the third part is now, how do you protect the workload that run on top of that infrastructure. So this is the part that aligned really well with Red Hat which is, Red Hat had wanted to take a lot of what we do around infrastructure, foster management configuration management and developer tools integrated into a lot of the things they do and obviously the workload protection part was a very seamless part of integrating us into the OpeShift part because we were built around cloud native constructs and obviously Red Hat having some of the foremost experts around cloud native sort of created a really great asset. >> Yeah, you guys got a great story. Obviously cloud native applications are rocking and rolling. You guys were in early serverless emerges, Kubernetes and then security in what I call the real time developer workflow. Ones that are building really fast, pushing code. Now it's called day two operations. So cloud native did two operations kind of encapsulates this new environment. You guys were right in the sweet spot of that. So this became quite the big deal, Red Hat saw an opportunity to bring you in. What was the motivation when you guys did the deal Was it like, "wow" this is a good fit. How did you react? What was the vibe at the StackRox when this was all going down? >> Yeah, so I think there's really three areas you look for, anytime a company comes up and sort of starts knocking on your door. One is really, is the team going to be the right fit? Is the culture going to be the right environment for the people? For us, that was a big part of what we were taking into consideration. We found Red Hat's general culture, how they approach people and sort of the overall approach the community was very much aligned with what we were trying to do. The second part of it was really the product fit. So we had from very early on started to focus purely on the Kubernetes components and doing everything we could, we call it sort of our product approach built in versus built it on and this is sort of a philosophy that Red Hat had adopted for a long time and it's a part of a lot of their developer tools, part of their shift left story as well as part of OpenShift. And then the third part of it was really the larger strategy of how do you go to market. So we were hitting that point where we were in triple digit customers and we were thinking about scalability and how to scale the company. And that was the part that also fit really well which was obviously, RedHat more and more hearing from their customers about the importance and the criticality of security. So that last part happened to be one part. We ended up spending a lot of time on it, ended up being sort of the outer three matches that made this acquisition happen. >> Well congratulations, always great to see startups in the right position. Good hustle, great product, great market. You guys did a great job, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Now, the big news here at KubeCon as Linux foundation open-source, you guys are announcing that you're open-sourcing at StackRox, this is huge news, obviously, you now work for an open-source company and so that was probably a part of it. Take us through the news, this is the top story here for this segment tickets through open-source. Take us through the news. >> Yeah, so traditionally StackRox was a proprietary tool. We do have open-source tooling but the entire platform in itself was a proprietary tool. This has been a number of discussions that we've had with the Red Hat team from the very beginning. And it sort of aligns around a couple of core philosophies. One is obviously Red Hat at its core being an open-source company and being very much plugged into the community and working with users and developers and engineers to be able to sort of get feedback and build better products. But I think the other part of it is that, I think a lot of us from a historic standpoint have viewed security to be a proprietary thing as we've always viewed the sort of magic algorithms or black boxes or some magic under the hood that really moved the needle. And that happens not to be the case anymore also because StackRox's philosophy was really built around Kubernetes and Built-in, we feel like one of the really great messages around wide open-source of security product is to build that trust with the community being able to expose, here's how the product works, here's how it integrates here are the actions it takes here's the ramifications or repercussions of some of the decisions you may make in the product. Those all I feel make for very good stories of how you build connection, trust and communication with the community and actually get feedback on it. And obviously at its core, the company being very much focused on Kubernetes developer tools, service manage, these are all open-source toolings obviously. So, for us it was very important to sort of talk the talk and walk the walk and this is sort of an easy decision at the end of the day for us to take the platform open-source. And we're excited about it because I think most still want a productized supported commercial product. So while it's great to have some of the tip of the spear customers look at it and adopt the open-source and be able to drive it themselves. We're still hearing from a lot of the customers that what they do want is really that support and that continuous management, maintenance and improvement around the product. So we're actually pretty excited. We think it's only going to increase our velocity and momentum into the community. >> Well, I got some questions on how it's going to work but I do want to get your comment because I think this is a pretty big deal. I had a conversation about 10 years ago with Doug Cutting, who was the founder of Hadoop, And he was telling me a story about a company he worked for, you know all this coding, they went under and the IP was gone, the software was gone and it was a story to highlight that proprietary software sometimes can never see the light of day and it doesn't continue. Here, you guys are going to continue the story, continue the code. How does that feel? What's your expectations? How's that going to work? I'm assuming that's what you're going to open it up which means that anyone can download the code. Is that right? Take us through how to first of all, do you agree with that this is going to stay alive and how's it going to work? >> Yeah, I mean, I think as a founder one of the most fulfilling things to have is something you build that becomes sustainable and stands the test of time. And I think, especially in today's world open-source is a tool that is in demand and only in a market that's growing is really a great way to do that. Especially if you have a sort of an established user base and the customer base. And then to sort of back that on top of thousands of customers and users that come with Red Hat in itself, gives us a lot of confidence that that's going to continue and only grow further. So the decision wasn't a difficult one, although transparently, I feel like even if we had pushed back I think Red Hat was pretty determined about open-source and we get anyway, but it's to say that we actually were in agreement to be able to go down that path. I do think that there's a lot of details to be worked out because obviously there's sort of a lot of the nuances in how you build product and manage it and maintain it and then, how do you introduce community feedback and community collaboration as part of open-source projects is another big part of it. I think the part we're really excited about is, is that it's very important to have really good community engagement, maintenance and response. And for us, even though we actually discussed this particular strategy during StackRox, one of the hindering aspects of that was really the resources required to be able to manage and maintain such a massive open-source project. So having Red Hat behind us and having a lot of this experience was very relevant. I think, as a, as a startup to start proprietary and suddenly open it and try to change your entire business model or go to market strategy commercialization, changed the entire culture of the company can sometimes create a lot of headwind. And as a startup, like sort of I feel like every year just trying not to die until you create that escape velocity. So those were I think some of the risk items that Red Hat was able to remove for us and as a result made the decision that much easier. >> Yeah, and you got the mothership with Red Hat they've done it before, they've been doing it for generations. You guys, you're in the startup, things are going crazy. It's like whitewater rafting, it's like everything's happening so fast. And now you got the community behind you cause you're going to have the CNC if you get Kubecon. I mean, it's a pretty great community, the support is amazing. I think the only thing the engineers might want to worry about is go back into the code base and clean things up a bit, as you start to see the code I'm like, wait a minute, their names are on it. So, it's always always a fun time and all serious now this is a big story on the DevSecOps. And I want to get your thoughts on this because kubernetes is still emerging, and DevOps is awesome, we've been covering that in for all of the life of theCUBE for the 11 years now and the greatness of DevOps but now DevSecOps is critical and Kubernetes native security is what people are looking at. When you look at that trend only continuing, what's your focus? What do you see? Now that you're in Red Hat as the CTO, former CTO of StackRox and now part of the Red Hat it's going to get bigger and stronger Kubernetes native and shifting left-hand or DevSecOps. What's your focus? >> Yeah, so I would say our focus is really around two big buckets. One is, Kubernetes native, sort of a different way to think about it as we think about our roadmap planning and go-to-market strategy is it's mutually exclusive with being in infrastructure native, that's how we think about it and as a startup we really have to focus on an area and Kubernetes was a great place for us to focus on because it was becoming the dominant orchestration engine. Now that we have the resources and the power of Red Hat behind us, the way we're thinking about this is infrastructure native. So, thinking about cloud native infrastructure where you're using composable, reusable, constructs and objects, how do you build potential offerings or features or security components that don't rely on third party tools or components anymore? How do you leverage the existing infrastructure itself to be able to conduct some of these traditional use cases? And one example we use for this particular scenario is networking. Networking, the way firewalling in segmentation was typically done was, people would tweak IP tables or they would install, for example, a proxy or a container that would terminate MTLS or become inline and it would create all sorts of sort of operational and risk overhead for users and for customers. And one of the things we're really proud of as sort of the company that pioneered this notion of cloud native security is if you just leverage network policies in Kubernetes, you don't have to be inline you don't have to have additional privileges, you don't have to create additional risks or operational overhead for users. So we're taking those sort of core philosophies and extending them. The same way we did to Kubernetes all the way through service manager, we're doing the same sorts of things Istio being able to do a lot of the things people are traditionally doing through for example, proxies through layer six and seven, we want to do through Istio. And then the same way for example, we introduced a product called GoDBledger which was an open-source tool, which would basically look at a yaml on helm charts and give you best practices responses. And it's something you we want for example to your get repositories. We want to take those sort of principles, enabling developers, giving them feedback, allowing them not to break their existing workflows and leveraging components in existing infrastructure to be able to sort of push security into cloud native. And really the two pillars we look at are ensuring we can get users and customers up and running as quickly as possible and reduce as much as possible operational overhead for them over time. So we feel these two are really at the core of open-sourcing in building into the infrastructure, which has sort of given us momentum over the last six years and we feel pretty confident with Red Hat's help we can even expand that further. >> Yeah, I mean, you bring up a good point and it's certainly as you get more scale with Red Hat and then the customer base, not only in dealing with the threat detection around containers and cloud native applications, you got to kind of build into the life cycle and you've got to figure out, okay, it's not just Kubernetes anymore, it's something else. And you've got advanced cluster security with Red Hat they got OpenShift cloud platform, you're going to have managed services so this means you're going to have scale, right? So, how do you view that? Because now you're going to have, you guys at the center of the advanced cluster security paradigm for Red Hat. That's a big deal for them and they've got a lot of R and D and a lot of, I wouldn't say R and D, but they got emerging technologies developing around that. We covered that in depth. So when you start to get into advanced cluster, it's compliance too, it's not just threat detection. You got insights telemetry, data acquisition, so you have to kind of be part of that now. How do you guys feel about that? Are you up for the task? >> Yeah, I hope so it's early days but we feel pretty confident about it, we have a very good team. So as part of the advanced cluster security we work also very closely with the advanced cluster management team in Red Hat because it's not just about security, it's about, how do you operationalize it, how do you manage it and maintain it and to your point sort of run it longterm at scale. The compliance part of it is a very important part. I still feel like that's in its infancy and these are a lot of conversations we're having internally at Red Hat, which is, we all feel that compliance is going to sort of more from the standard benchmarks you have from CIS or particular compliance requirements like the power, of PCI or Nest into how do you create more flexible and composable policies through a unified language that allows you to be able to create more custom or more useful things specific to your business? So this is actually, an area we're doing a lot of collaboration with the advanced cluster management team which is in that, how do you sort of bring to light a really easy way for customers to be able to describe and sort of abstract policies and then at the same time be able to actually and enforce them. So we think that's really the next key point of what we have to accomplish to be able to sort of not only gain scale, but to be able to take this notion of, not only detection in response but be able to actually build in what we call declarative security into your infrastructure. And what that means is, is to be able to really dictate how you want your applications, your services, your infrastructure to be configured and run and then anything that is sort of conflicting with that is auto responded to and I think that's really the larger vision that with Red Hat, we're trying to accomplish. >> And that's a nice posture to have you build it in, get it built in, you have the declarative models then you kind of go from there and then let the automation kick in. You got insights coming in from Red Hat. So all these things are kind of evolving. It's still early days and I think it was a nice move by Red Hat, so congratulations. Final question for you is, as you prepare to go to the next generation KubeCon is also seeing a lot more end user participation, people, you know, cloud native is going mainstream, when I say mainstream, seeing beyond the hyperscalers in the early adopters, Kubernetes and other infrastructure control planes are coming in you start to see the platforms emerge. Nobody wants another security tool, they want platforms that enable applications handle tools. As it gets more complicated, what's going to be the easy button in security cloud native? What's the approach? What's your vision on what's next? >> Yeah so, I don't know if there is an easy button in security and I think part of it is that there's just such a fragmentation and use cases and sort of designs and infrastructure that doesn't exist, especially if you're dealing with such a complex stack. And not only just a complex stack but a potentially use cases that not only span runtime but they deal with you deployment annual development life cycle. So the way we think about it is more sort of this notion that has been around for a long time which is the shared responsibility model. Security is not security's job anymore. Especially, because security teams probably cannot really keep up with the learning curve. Like they have to understand containers then they have to understand Kubernetes and Istio and Envoy and cloud platforms and APIs. and there's just too much happening. So the way we think about it is if you deal with security a in a declarative version and if you can state things in a way where how infrastructure is ran is properly configured. So it's more about safety than security. Then what you can do is push a lot of these best practices back as part of your gift process. Involve developers, engineers, the right product security team that are responsible for day-to-day managing and maintaining this. And the example we think about is, is like CVEs. There are plenty of, for example, vulnerability tools but the CVEs are still an unsolved problem because, where are they, what is the impact? Are they actually running? Are they being exploited in the wild? And all these things have different ramifications as you span it across the life cycle. So for us, it's understanding context, understanding assets ensuring how the infrastructure has to handle that asset and then ensuring that the route for that response is sent to the right team, so they can address it properly. And I think that's really our larger vision is how can you automate this entire life cycle? So, the information is routed to the right teams, the right teams are appending it to the application and in the future, our goal is not to just pardon the workload or the compute environment, but use this information to action pardon application themselves and that creates that additional agility and scalability. >> Yeah it's in the lifecycle of that built in right from the beginning, more productivity, more security and then, letting everything take over on the automation side. Ali congratulations on the acquisition deal with Red Hat, buyout that was great for them and for you guys. Take a minute to just quickly answer final final question for the folks watching here. The big news is you're open-sourcing StackRox, so that's a big news here at KubeCon. What can people do to get involved? Well, just share a quick quick commercial for what people can do to get involved? What are you guys looking for? Take a pledge to the community? >> Yeah, I mean, what we're looking for is more involvement in direct feedback from our community, from our users, from our customers. So there's a number, obviously the StackRox platform itself being open-source, we have other open-source tools like the KubeLinter. What we're looking for is feedback from users as to what are the pain points that they're trying to solve for. And then give us feedback as to how we're not addressing those or how can we better design our systems? I mean, this is the sort of feedback we're looking for and naturally with more resources, we can be a lot faster in response. So send us feedback good or bad. We would love to hear it from our users and our customers and get a better sense of what they're looking for. >> Innovation out in the open love it, got to love open-source going next gen, Ali Golshan Senior Director of Global Software Engineering the new title at Red Hat former CTO and founder of StackRox which spread had acquired in January, 2021. Ali thanks for coming on congratulations. >> Thanks for having, >> Okay, so keeps coverage of Kube Con cloud native Con 2021. I'm John Furrie, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Welcome to the Virtual Cube and our coverage of aws reinvent 2020. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm joined by Ali Siddiqui, the chief product officer of BMC Software. We're gonna be talking about what BMC and A W s are doing together. Ali, it's great to have you on the Cube. Thank >>you, Lisa. Get great to be here and be part off AWS treatment. Exciting times. >>They are exciting times. That is true. No, never a dull moment these days, right? So all he talked to me a little bit. About what? A w what BMC is doing with AWS. Let's dig into what you're doing there on the technology front and unpack the benefits that you're delivering to customers. Great >>questions, Lisa. So at BMC, we really have a close partnership with AWS. It's really about BMC. Placido Blue s better together for our customers. That's what it's really about. We have a global presence, probably the largest, uh, off any window out there in this in our industry with 15 data centers, AWS data centers around the globe. We just announced five more in South Africa. Brazil Latin Um, a P J. A couple of them amia across the globe. Really? The presence is very strong with these, uh, data centers because that lets us offered local presence, Take care of GDP are and we have great certification. That is Aw, sock to fedramp. I'll four Haifa dram. We even got hip certifications as well as a dedicated Canada certifications for our customers. Thanks to our partnership, close partnership with the WS and on all these datas into the cross. In addition, for our customers, really visibility into aws seamless capability toe do multi cloud management is key and with a recent partnership with AWS around specifically AWS >>s >>S m, which gives customers cream multi cloud capabilities around multi cloud management, total visibility seamlessly in AWS and all their services whether it's easy toe s s s three sage maker, whatever services they have, we let them discover on syphilis. Lee give them visibility into that. >>That 360 degree visibility is really key to understand the dependencies right between the software in the services and help customers to optimize their investments in a W s assume correct. >>Exactly. With the AWS s s m and r E I service management integration. We really give deep visibility on the dependency, how they're being used, what services are being impacted and and really, AWS s system is a key, unique technology which we've integrated with them very, very happy with the results are customers are getting from it. >>Can you share some of those results? Operational efficiencies, Cost savings? Yeah, >>Yeah, least another great question. So when I look at the general picture off E I service management in the eye ops, which we run with AWS across all these global dinner senses and specifically with AWS S S M people are able to do customers. And this is like the talkto hyper scale, as we're talking about, as well as large telcos like Ericsson and and some of the leading, uh, industry retail Or or, you know, other customers we have They're getting great value because they're able to do service modeling, automatically use ascend to get true deep visibility seamlessly to do service discovery with for for for all the assets that they run or using our S service management in the eye ops capabilities. It really is the neck shin and it's disrupting the service idea Some traditional service management industry with what we offering now with the service management, AWS s, S M and other AWS Cloud needed capabilities such as sage Maker and AWS, Lex and connect that we leverage in our AI service management ai absolution. We recently announced that as a >>single >>unified platform which allows our customers to go on BMC customers and joined with AWS customers to go on this autonomous digital enterprise journey Uh, this announcement was done by our CEO of BMC. I'm in Say it in BMC Exchange recently, where we basically launched a single lady foundation, a single platform for observe ability, engagement with automation >>for the autonomous digital enterprise. I presume I'd like to understand to, from your perspective, this disruption that you're enabling. How is it helping your customers not just survive this viral disruption that we're all living with but be able thio, get the disability into their software and services, really maximize and optimize their cloud investments so that their business can operate well during these unprecedented times, meet their customer demands, exceed them and meet their customers. Where? There. How is this like an accelerator of that >>great question, Lisa. So when we say autonomous digital enterprise, this is the journey All our customers they're taking on its focus on three trips, agility, customer center, city and action ability. So if you think about our solutions with AWS, really, it's s of its management. AI ops enables these enterprises to go on this autonomous digital enterprise journey where they can offer great engagement to the employees. All CEOs really care about employee engagement. Happy employees make for more revenue for for those enterprises, as well as offer great customer experience for the customers. Uh, using our AI service management and AI ops combined. 80 found in this single platform, which we are calling 80 foundation. >>Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. >>No, go ahead, please. >>I was going to say I always look at the employee experience, and the customer experience is absolutely inextricably linked with the employee experience is hampered. That's bride default. Almost going to impact the customer experience. And right now, I don't know if it's even possible to say both the employee experience and the customer experience are even mawr essential to really get right because now we've got this. You know this big scatter That happened a few months ago with some companies that were completely 100% on site to remote being able, needing to give their employees access to the tools to do their jobs properly so that they can deliver products and services and solutions that customers need. So I always see those two employees. Customer experience is just inextricably linked. >>Absolutely. That's correct, especially in this time, even if the new pandemic these epidemics time, uh, the chief human resource offers. The CEOs are really thick focused on keeping the employees engaged and retaining top talent. And that's where our yes service management any other solution helps them really do. Use our digital assistance chat boards, which are powered by a W X and Lex and AWS connect and and and our integration with, uh, helix control them, which is another service we launched on AWS Helix Control them, which is our South version off a leading SAS product automation product out there, a swell as RP integrations we bring to the table, which really allows them toe take employing, give management to the next level And that's top of mind for all CEOs and being driven by line of business like chief human resource officers. Such >>a great point. Are you? Are you finding that mawr of your conversations with customers are at that sea level as they look to things like AI ops to help find you in their business that it's really that that sea level not concerned but priority to ensure that we're doing everything we can within our infrastructure, wherever where our software and services are to really ensure that we're delivering and exceeding customer expectations? That a very tumultuous time? >>Yes, What we're finding is, uh, really at the CEO level CEO level the sea level. It's about machine learning ai adopting that more than the enterprise and specifically in our capabilities when I say ai ops. So those are around root cause predictive I t. And even using ai NLP for self service for self service is a big part, and we offer key capabilities. We just did an acquisition come around, which lets them do knowledge management self service. So these are specific capabilities, predictability, ai ops and knowledge management. Self service that we offer that really is resonating very well with CEOs who are looking to transform their I T systems and in I t ops and align it with business is much better and really do innovation in this area. So that's what's happening, and it's great to see that we will do that. Exact capabilities that come with R E Foundation. The unified platform forms of ability and lets customers go on this autonomous digital enterprise journey without keeping capabilities. >>Do you see this facilitating the autonomous digital enterprise as as a way to separate the winners and losers of tomorrow as so much of the world has changed and some amount of this is going to be permanent, imagine that's got to be a competitive advantage to customers in any industry. >>We believe enterprises that have the growth mindset and and want to go into the next generation, and that's most of them. Toe, to be honest, are really looking at the ready autonomous digital price framework that we offer and work with our customers on the way to grow revenue to get more customer centric, increase employee engagement. That's what we see happening in the industry, and that's where our capabilities with 80 Foundation as well as Helix. Whether it's Felix Air Service management, he likes a Iot or now recently launched Helix Control them really enable them toe keep their existing, uh, you know, tools as well as keep their existing investments and move the ICTY ops towards the next generation off tooling and as well as increase employee engagement with our leading industry leading digital assistant chat board and and SMS management solution that that's what we see. And that's the journey we're taking with most of our customers and really, the ones with the growth mindset are really being distinguished as the front runs >>talk to me about some validation from the customer's perspective, the industry's perspective. What are you guys hearing about? What you're doing s BMC and with a w s >>so validation from customer that I just talked about great validation. As I said, talk to off the hyper skills users for proactive problem management. Proactive incident management ai ops a same time independent validation from Gardner we are back wear seven years and I don't know in a row So seven years the longest street in Gartner MQ for I t s m and we are a leader in that for seven years the longest run so far by any vendor. We are scoring the top in the top number one position in 12 of the 15 critical capabilities. As you know, Gardner, I d s m eyes really about the critical capability that where most customers look. So that's a big independent validation. Where we score 12 off the way were number one in 12 of the 15 capability. So that was the awesome validation from Gardner and I. D. S M. We also recently E Mei Enterprise Management Associates published a new report on AI Ops and BMT scored the top spot on the charts with Business impact and business alignment. Use cases categories for AI ops. So think about what that means. It's really about your business, right? So So we being the top of the chart for business impact and business alignment for ai ops radar report from Enterprise Management associated with a create independent validation that we can point toe off our solutions and what it is, really, because we partner very closely with our customers. We also got a couple of more awards than we want a lot more, but just to mention two more I break breakthrough, which is a nursery leading third party sources out there for chat boards and e i base chat board solution lamed BMC Helix Chat Board as the best chat board solution out there. Uh, SAS awards another industry analysts from independent from which really, uh really shows the how we're getting third parties and independents to talk about our solutions named BMC SAS per ticket and event management, which is really a proactive problem and proactive incident solution Revolution system as as the best solution out there for ticketing and event management. >>So a lot of accolades. A. Yes. It sounds like a lot of alcohol. A lot of validation. How do customers get How do you get started? So customers looking to come to BMC to really understand get that 3 60 degree visibility. How did they get started? >>Uh, well, they can start with our BMC Discovery, which integrates very tightly with AWS s s M toe. Basically get the full visibility off assets from network to storage toe aws services. Whether there s three. Uh, easy to, uh doesn't matter what services they did. A Kafka service they're using whatever. So the hundreds of services they're using weaken seamlessly do that. So that's one way to do that. Just start with BMC Helix Discovery. Thea Other one is with BMC Knowledge Management on BMC Self Service. That's a quick win for most of our customers. I ai service management, tooling That's the Third Way and I I, off stooling with BMC, Helix Monitor and AI ops that we offer pretty much the best in the industry in those that customers can start So the many areas, and now with BMC, control them. If they want to start with automation, that's a great way to start with BMC control them, which is our SAS solution off industry leading automation product called Controlling. >>And so, for just last question from a go to market perspective, it sounds like direct through BMC Channel partners. What about through a. W. S? >>Yes, absolutely. I mean again, we it's all about BMC and AWS better together we offer cloud native AWS services for our solutions, use them heavily, and I just mentioned whether that S S M or chat boards or any of the above or sage maker for machine learning I and customers can contact the local AWS Rep toe to start learning about BMC and AWS. Better together. >>Excellent. Well, Ali, thank you for coming on the program, talking to us about what BMC is doing to help your customers become that autonomous digital enterprise that we think up tomorrow. They're going to need to be to have that competitive edge. I've enjoyed talking to you >>same year. Thank you so much, Lisa. Really. It's about our customers and partnering with AWS. So very proud of Thank you so much. >>Excellent for Ali Siddiqui. I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching the Cube.

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's the cube with coverage of Kubecon and cloud nativecon North America, 2020 virtual brought to you by Red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE, >> Coverage of Kubecon cloud nativecon 2020. It's virtual this year, though, theCUBE is virtual. This is theCUBE virtual I'm John Furrier your host. This is the segment where we kind of pre tease out the show for this year. We do a CUBE review and analyze and talk about some of the things we're expecting trends in the marketplace. And I'm pleased to announce a new CUBE co-host with me, Ali Amagasu, who's been part of theCUBE community since 2013, going back to the OpenStack days, which is now different name, but it's private clouds making a come back. But she's part of the cloud community, the cloud Harati, as we say, Ali, welcome to being a CUBE host. >> Thank you so much, John. It's a pleasure, it's been a while since we've hung out, but I do remember pestering you back in those days, and I've certainly stayed with theCUBE ever since then. I mean, you guys are an institution to put it. >> It's been so much fun, I have to say I had less gray hair. I didn't have glasses, I wear contacts. Now I have progressive vision, so I can't wear the contacts. They're hard for me, but it's been such a great evolution. And one of the things that's been really important to our mission has been to be kind of like an upstream project to be kind of open and be part of the community to be on the ground floor. We can't be there this year 'cause of the pandemic, but it's been great and about a few years ago, Stu Miniman and I were seeing that we had a great community of people who wanted a co-host, and we got a great community host model. And thanks for coming on and being part of this mission, it's been important to our mission. We've got Lisa Martin, Rebecca Knight, John Troyer, Keith Townson, Justin Warren, Corey Quinn, to name a few. So welcome to the crew, thanks for coming on. >> Sure I'm happy to step in. >> So I want to go back in time. I mean, when we first met in 2013, you were a part of Metacloud, which got acquired by Cisco at that time, OpenStack was hot, OpenStack was at the cloud. And if you think about where Amazon was at that point and time, it was really the beginning of that sea change of rapid cloud scale, public cloud, specifically OpenStack kind of settled in, and that's kind of making a nice foundation for private cloud right now. It's still out there, telco clouds. You're seeing that trend, but this is the sixth Kubecon we've been there at all of them. We were there at the founding president creation. What an interesting turn of events. The world is kind of spun in the direction of all the conversations we were having back in 2013, 14, 15, 16. Now fast forward Kubernetes is the hottest thing on the planet and cloud native is the construct for all these modern apps, so what's your take on it. What's your view on this? 'Cause you've been riding this wave. >> Well, I think it's interesting. You brought up OpenStack because I remember in those days, OpenStack was smoking hot. And I remember talking to some of the organizers from the foundation, what they said was we want OpenStack to be boring. We want it to be part of the background. We will know we've made it when it's boring. And we could argue that they're there now, right? They aren't what we're talking about as much, but they're still there, they're still doing their thing. They're still growing as far as I know. So that's happened and now Kubernetes is the incredible hotness and it's just exploded. And so it turned from, you know, just a few projects, to now, if you look at the list of projects that are in incubation list of projects that have graduated, it's pretty long, and it's an impressive set of capabilities, when you look. >> It's been really interesting, you know, Dan Collin who's, the Ben was the director of the CNCF. I remember talking to him early on. And when he came, when he joined, he was, he hustled hard. He was smart. And he had a vision to balance the growing ecosystem cause he's done successful startups. So he kind of kind of knows the rocket ship labor, but he basically brought that entrepreneurial startup mentality. And I saw him in China when I was there with Intel with Alibaba conference in the lobby of the hotel, I'm like, dad, what are you doing here? So the CNC, I was already thinking global. They build out the most impressive landscape of vendors to participate in cloud nativecon and Kubecon At the same time, they maintain that end user focused. If you look at Envoy, right, it came from Lyft. So you have this really nice balance. And you know, it was always people chirping and complaining about this, that, and the other thing on the vendor's side. But the end user focus has been such a strong hand for Kubecon and the CNCF. It's just been really impressive and they maintain that. And this is the key. >> And I think what's impressive is that they've evolved. They've continued, they haven't sat there and said, "We've got a couple of fantastic projects," right? They're bringing in new ones all the time. They're staying at the cutting edge. They're looking at serverless and making sure there's projects that are taking care of that. And so I think that's, what's keeping it relevant, is the fact that they're relentlessly evolving. >> Yeah, and we comment, I think two years ago, Stu and I were pontificating about, can they maintain it? And one of the things that we were predicting, I want to get your reaction to this is that as Kubernetes becomes more standard and you're starting to see the tipping point now where it's beyond just testing and deploying in some clusters, you're starting to see Kubernetes native and in part of everything, in part of the future as service meshes and wrap around it and other things, the commercialization, the success of the vendor side is starting to be there. You starting to see real viable companies be started. So do they become end-users or so? So the question was, can it maintain its open source vibe while you have all this commercialization going on? Because that's always the challenge in open source. How do you balance it? What's your reaction to that threat or maybe an opportunity? >> I don't think it's a threat. I think there will always be folks who want to do it themselves. They want to use the vanilla upstream, Kubernetes. They want to build it. They don't want any vendor interference. There's also a very other solid other camp that says, "No, no, we don't want to deal with the updates ourselves. We don't want to deal with the integration with networking and security and all those things." And the vendor takes care of that. So I really think it's just serving two different audiences that as far as I can tell are changing, they're not, I don't see one side growing and one side shrinking. I really see it staying same, pretty stable. And so it's serving both teams. >> Yeah, I totally agree. And this is what's great about evolution. And when you talk about the community gets about the people involved. And I was riffing with someone the other day and were like, "Hey, you know what makes CNCF different?" And we were saying that everyone kind of knows each other. So as you have, you know, the most popular thing at Kubecon is the hallway tracks, right? So hallway tracks are always popular. And just being in the hallways, we call it lobby con and the CUBES on the floor there. So there's a lot of hallway conversations as hallway tracks, there's lightening talks, there's always something exciting, but even though people might move around from company to company for project to project, everyone kind of knows each other. So I think that kind of gives this kind of self governance piece, some legs. >> It does, and you're bringing up something that's really relevant right now 'cause it's virtual this year, right? So we don't get to have those hallway conversations. We don't get to have those, you know, accidental, you know, connections that means so much. I think they did an amazing job, amazing with the European version of Kubecon and you know, they're doing the best they can, I think the attend, I heard the attendance was great. The sessions were incredible from an efficiency standpoint. If you're an attendee, you could hit so many more sessions from home. There was so much to learn, the content was fabulous. The one thing that's missing, and I don't know how they replicate it is that ability to connect with your colleagues in the hallway, the folks you haven't seen'cause they, they moved on, they went to a different company. Maybe they'd been to two or three companies since you saw them last and the one place, you know, you're going to see them is at Kubecon or some of the other conferences you attend. >> Yeah and talking to Priyanka. And some of the co-chairs one of the things that was interesting out of that last conference was you had the virtual theater, but the Slack channel was very engaging. So you had people leaning in on the dialogue and it's interesting. And this is where I want to ask you your thoughts on the top conversations as we prepare. And we start doing the remote interviews, with the leaders of the CNCF, as well as the top end users, as well as vendors and companies, people want to know what's the top conversation that's happening and what are we looking for? So I want to ask you, what are you looking for, Ali? What are the things that you're trying to squint through? What smoke signals you're looking for? What's the trends that you're trying to tease out a coupon this year? >> I'm going to be really interested. You know, I already mentioned it once, but I'm going to be interested to hear how the new serverless projects are going. I know there are a couple in incubation that sounds really interesting. Priyanka brought them up when I've spoken with her. And so I'd love to see if those are getting so traction. What does the momentum around those look like? Is there as much excitement service meshes there was last year. I know there was a lot of discussion about what was happening with search. Most people were really excited. So I want to know what's happening with that. I want to know how new users to the community are dealing with the proliferation of projects. You know, how are they finding out ways to get involved? How are we nurturing new members to the CNCF community and making sure that they aren't overwhelmed, that they find their niche and they're able to contribute to become users, to do whatever their role is meant to be. I think those are the interesting things to me. How about you? >> That's a good question. I mean, I've, there's so many things. I mean, I look at the first of all, the open source projects are phenomenal. And again, talking about the people, I love to see the things that are maturing and getting promoted and what's kind of in sandbox, but I look at the, some of the ecosystem landscape maps with the vendors. And if you look at Amazon, Cisco and the HPE, IBM cloud, red hat, VMware to name a few, and you've got some other companies like Convolt for instance, which is pivoting to a cloud service, Microsoft Palo Alto networks for security Rancho was acquired., you know, a lot of companies are, I think at capital one out there, always in great end. You always great stuff. You got interesting and in Docker, for example, cup Docker containers, we did Docker con this year and I was blown away by the demand, the interest and just the openness of DAPA as they re-pivoted back to their roots. But I'm interested to see how the big cloud vendors are going to play because Google has always been an impressive and dominant partner in KubeCon, Amazon then joined, Azure is in there as well. So you've got those three, the big three in there. So the question is, okay, as this ecosystem is growing, I'm trying to tease out what is this, everything as a service, because one of the things that's coming out on the customer side, if you work backwards from the customer, they're getting kind of the missions from the CEOs and the CIO or CSO saying, "Take everything as a service," which is kind of like, I call it the ivory tower kind of marching orders. And then it gets handed down to the cloud architects and the developers and they go, "What's that? How's that, how does it's kind of hard?" It's not easy, right? So the modern apps is one and then this, everything as a service business model is going to be based upon cloud native. So I think the cloud native, this is the year that cloud native is going to start showing some signs and some visibility into what the metrics are going to be for success around the key projects. And then who can deliver at scale, do everything is a service. So, you know, understanding what that means, what does Kubernetes enable? What are some of the new things? So to me, I'm trying to tease that out because I think that's the next big wave. Everything is a service. And then what that means technically, how do you achieve it? Because when you start rolling out, it's like, okay, what's next? >> Yeah, I wonder who are going to be the new super users that emerged from this, you know, who are going to be the companies that maybe didn't adopt early, they're getting in now and they start running with it and they do incredible new things with it. And the truth is going to your earlier point about whether or not commercializing that, you know, should it be an upstream thing where you're using it vanilla using, you know, pure Kubernetes or using a vendor version? The truth is when you start getting vendors involved and getting super users involved, and these big companies, they can throw 10, 20 people at projects as contributors. You know, I tend to think of open source as being a bunch of small companies, but the truth is it's a lot harder for a small company to dedicate multiple head count to full-time contributions, right? Well big company, you could throw a couple dozen at them and not even blink. And so that's, it's critical to the survival truthfully of the community that we have, these big companies get in there and run with it. >> You know, I was talking to Constance and Steven Augustus, they're both co-chairs of the event and Steven brought up something. That's interesting because it's the theme that's kind of talked about, but no one likes to talk about it because it's kind of important and ugly at the same time. It's security and I think one of the things that I'm looking for this year, Ali is, you know, there's a buzz word out there has been kind of overused, but it's still kind of relevant and it's called shift left. So shift left means how do you build security into the CICB pipeline? So developers don't have to come back and do stuff, right? So it's like baking security in. This is going to be kind of a nuance point because of course everyone wants security, but that's not what application developers think about every day, right? It's like, they're not like security people, right? So, but they got to have security. So I think whoever can crack the code on making security brain dead easy will be great. And how that works together with across multiple vendors. So to me, that's something that I want to understand more. I don't yet have a formed opinion on it, but certainly we're hearing "Shift left" a lot. >> Yes I agree 100% at first we had developers and operators. Then we had devOps. Now I hear sec devOps all the time. You know, that I started hearing that last year and now these poor developers, you know, suddenly they are, whether they want to be, or not, to some degree, they are responsible for their company security, because if they aren't integrating best practices into their code, then they are introducing vulnerabilities. And so it it's just fallen upon them, whether they signed up for it or not, it's fallen upon them. And it'll be real interesting to see how that plays out. >> Well, one of the things I'd love to do is get me, you John, Troy, Keith Townsend, Justin Warren, and certainly Corey Quinn on a podcast or CUBE interview because man, we would have some war stories and have some real good stories to tell the evolution of what's real. And what's not real. Certainly Cory queen allows to talk about kind of like squinting through the hype and calling out kind of what's real, but this is kind of really kind of what's going on with coop comes a lot of exciting things. So I have to ask you over the years within CNCF and cloud nativecon and Kubecon, what are some of your favorite memories or moments that you can share could be personal, could be professional, could be code, could be accompany. What's some of the things that you can share about some, some happy moments for Kubecon >> Sure, sure, I'd say for me, some of the best moments have been the recent pivot toward trying to take care of the attendees. You know, I don't remember if it was San Diego. I think it was San Diego where they brought in all the puppies or mental wellness. And there was a meditation room. I don't know if you went in there, but it was quiet. And there was just some very soft lighting and some quiet music. And I didn't know how much traction that was going to get amongst attendees, that room was packed every time I went in there, dead quiet people relaxing, the puppies were bananas. People were just hoarding around the puppies and wanting to pet them. And I just really liked the way that they had really thought of a bunch of different angles to try to make sure that people who have left their families, they've come to a different place. They're, they're, they're under stress. 'Cause they're probably traveling with their boss and a bunch of their colleagues and they're stressed. And so to make sure that they had a break, I thought that was really somewhere where KubeCon was ahead of a lot of the other conferences I see. And it wasn't a single approach. It wasn't, we're going to throw a bunch of dogs in the hallway. It was, we're going to do that. We're going to have a therapist do a session. We're going to have puzzles in a quiet area at the hallway. It really went all in. And so for me, that was one of my favorite things from recent years. I thought that was fantastic. How about you? >> It's been fun. I mean, it's just so many moments. I mean, I love the European show. We did one year when I first, first time they had rolled out in Europe and I thought that was just so small and intimate. Of course the big mega shows have been great with activity. I think, but one of my favorite moments was I was wandering in the lobby. This was in Europe. It was, and it was a huge EU event, I think 2018 might've been, and I'm kind of buzzing around the lobby and I had nothing to do that night. And it was like five to 11 different parties to go to. People have, you know, dinners. And I ran into one of the CNCF co-hosts and also she's a Google engineer and I'm like, "Hey, what are you guys doing?" I'm like, she's like, "Oh, we're going to the women's happy hour." And I'm like, "Oh, that's cool." I'm like, "It sounds good." And she invited me and I went with her and I was the only guy there, okay. >> Oh lucky you. >> And I looked around and it was packed. And I said to myself, this is freaking amazing. And it was great women, great leaders, smart, super awesome. And they were all welcomed me. I wasn't like being stared at either, by the way. So I'm like, okay, there was no line for the men's room either by the way, just to, you know, and I was like, good tweet there. But I felt really welcomed. And I thought that was very cool. It was packed. And I went back until it's too much. Do you can't believe it was just really awesome. I was in this awesome happy hour. And I remember saying to myself, "This community is inclusive, they're awesome. And it was just one of just a great moment. >> It's great you've got to be the other side of that, right? Because as a woman, I am always on the standard side of it, which has guys everywhere, there's very few women, but here's the thing I have never felt intimidated or uncomfortable in any way at a Kubecon I've always felt welcomed, I've had fabulous interactions. I've met people from around the world. And I try to explain to my kids actually, when we talk and they they'll say something sometime not xenophobic, maybe that's an overstatement, but they're little kids. They don't have a great understanding of the world. And I'll say, "Wait till you grow up and you go to one of these conferences, you'll realize that people from countries that even fear that some of them there's some of the kindest, nicest, most polite people I have ever met. And you walk away really feeling like you want to just throw your arms around everyone, that's been my experience anyway. S0 maybe I've been lucky, but I haven't had that intimidation factor at all. >> You got it, you've got a great mindset and your kids are lucky. And I feel like for me, the moment was the community is very open and inclusive. And I think theCUBE when we interview people, we want people who are smart, you know, and we interview a lot of great women and at KubeCon, it's been fantastic, so that's the highlight. And of course the grueling hours, and then, you know, people like to drink beer in this community. And I like beer, although I'd been trimming down a little bit because, you know, IPA's have been kind of getting heavy on me, but good beer drinkers. They like to have fun and they also work hard and it's a great community, so. >> And now you have to bring your own beer. Now that it's virtual, you have to keep your own IPA. >> Well, the joke was virtual is that we can have a better lunch at home. 'Cause that's always kind of like the event thing. But I think virtuals, I miss the face to face, but we get to talk to more people with remote and they get more traffic on the site, but hopefully when it comes back, it'll be hybrid and we'll still be kind of doing more remote, but more face-to-face. >> So well, and it's more affordable. I did not look at what the pricing is this time, but I know for the European version, the pricing was very fair, certainly more affordable than going in real life. And, you know, for some folks who really can't swing that travel costs and the registration fee, it's a great opportunity to get in on the cheap and suck up a lot of knowledge really quickly. >> Well, Ali, thank you for riffing on Kubecon preview. Thank you very much. And looking forward to hosting with you and thanks for co-hosting on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you so much, John. I enjoyed it. >> Thank you, okay you're watching theCUBE virtual. This is a Kubecon preview. I'm here with Ali. I'm a goo who's our new CUBE host helping out on the Kubecon looking forward to more interviews, this is the CUBE I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back already, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studio today for a CUBE Conversation that's a little bit of a deeper dive into the Cisco CloudCenter, we've had an ongoing conversation and there's a new component today, we're going to do a deep dive, so we're excited to welcome back to the studio CUBE alumni Ali G, technical leader, software engineering group from Cisco, Ali, great to see you again. >> Thank you so much, happy to be here. >> Absolutely, and joining us from New Jersey via the phone is Michael Chenetz, he's a technical marketing engineer from Cisco, Michael, great to see you. >> Hey, great to see you guys. >> And I hope you'll go get a cheese steak when we're finished and figure out how you can send it to me, I don't know if that's possible. But anyway, welcome. So let's jump into it, so Cisco CloudCenter, we've been talking about it for a while, but today we wanted to dig into a very specific feature, and it goes technically by AO, but that stands for the Action Orchestrator. Ali, what's Action Orchestrator all about? >> Well, action orchestration is a component inside our CloudCenter Suite that brings together cross-domain orchestration. And it's extremely useful because not only is it valuable for DevOps engineers to orchestrate and maintain and automate their infrastructure, but it's also useful for application developers to define workflow and orchestration in their products as well. So, this tool is heavily used throughout the stack, inside the cloud, at the application level, all the way down to the intro level as well, and it's made it extremely easy for DevOps engineers to get their hands on defining workflows, and conditions and logics where they can create, maintain, all the appropriate infrastructure that they need. Works very well hand to hand with the current technology out there like Terraform or Ansible, and it's part of our CloudCenter Suite, so. >> And is it more on the config side or is it more on kind of the operational workflow side? >> Correct, so it could be used for both, right, it's so flexible in a matter of this abstraction of having the orchestration engine outside, enables both developers and DevOps engineers to illustrate and create their workflows. Rather, it's again based on infrastructure or even networking layers, are all the way up the stack to the application where if your product requires an orchestration engine in the back end, to process work, this component definitely plays a big role, right, so. >> Okay. Michael, throw it over to you. >> Yeah, so I think everything that Ali is saying is absolutely correct, the nice part about it is it's a product that can really do whatever you imagine, so I mean we've seen people use it for business process, for automation of network, server, cloud, whatever you can think of, it's extensible but we're going to talk about that in a little bit, but really the nice part about it is you create the workflows and you design the way that you want to go. And what I have here, if you can show the next video, is just a little clip of what it would look like to go through a workflow. So let's cue that up and we'll take a walk through it. >> Jeff: Let's go to the video number one, guys. >> Michael: All right, so... Yeah, so if you look here, what we're seeing is, we're seeing a preview of what Amazon looked like beforehand, looking at VPCs and subnets, and now what we're doing is going through a workflow that is going to show afterwards that those actual VPCs and subnets were created by using a flow. So what we're going to do is just pick one flow here, which is called create infra, and this is just an example, and what you see on the left-hand side is something called actions, so these are all the atomic actions that are available. But these are just out of the box, we're adding stuff all the time, and these actions could be dragged over to the right and create workflows. And the nice thing about it is if it's not there, you can create them in minutes and we're going to show you that in a little bit, too. So, right now what I'm going to show you is the fact that if you click on each one of these actions, there's actually some kind of information that you'll see on the right-hand side, and this information is how you configure that particular action, so this particular one's going to create a VPC, and you can see the VPC name, you can see the VPC subnet, and whatever other parameters are needed for that particular action. So now I'll have to do, you pretty much select the target, and this one already had a target selected, which is Amazon, or AWS, and this second action here, if you look down, actually has a parameter too, or a couple parameters, and one of those parameters, you can see the first one is just the name, the second one, though, is actually used in a variable from the previous step. So really really easy to map stuff from different workflow elements, and it allows you to quickly kind of glue things together to make things work, so this is just an example, again, very simple example, that this is going to create infrastructure on Amazon, and you can think about using this as part of the process, like when you're trying to bring up a cloud environment, maybe you run this first. Maybe you run this to say, "Hey, I need some infrastructure "for that cloud environment," and maybe you even want to execute bringing up certain VMs or containers, you could do that afterwards. But this was just a really really quick showcase of a simple thing you can do with very few steps, that you could then run and it will actually, we're going to run, hit validate here, just validates the workflow, but once we click run here, it's actually going to create all of that stuff within Amazon, so in this step you're going to see the run, you can see that both steps work, because they're green. If they didn't work, they'd be red, and we're going to show that in one second. But, when you click on a step it actually shows you the input and output of each one of those steps, so it's really really cool in that all the information that you could possible think of that you'll need to troubleshoot, to look at these things, is available in the workflow by just clicking on each one of these steps and seeing what that input and output, so if you could imagine, if you had an error there, you could quickly figure out what that is, it would tell you the error, it would tell you what's going on, or, if you needed information from a step before, you could run it, get the information from the step before, and then figure out what values you need for the next step. So really really cool in that you could look at this workflow, you get all the information you need, and it allows you to create these workflows and kind of glue 'em together, really really quick. And now what I'm going to show you, I believe, is in the next part here, I'm just going to illustrate that if you go over to the runs that we have here, it'll actually keep a list of all of the different runs we did, and you can see one is in red. Well, that one in red means that a step didn't work. Well let's click on that step and figure out "Hey, why didn't this step work?" Well this step didn't work because of an error that we got, and if we scroll down to the bottom over here, what we're going to see is the actual error that had occurred within this step. So now we know exactly what the problem was, and we can fix it within the next step, so in this particular one, we illustrated right there that there was some problem with, I think a VPC, or the way that I phrased that VPC, or that subnet, I'm sorry, and it caused the problem. But I fixed it within the next step, and now you can see that in these particular two screens that the VPC and the subnet was created automatically within that workflow. >> Pretty cool, so what would they have done to accomplish that in the past? >> So to accomplish that in the past, and this is the real thing that we see, we see that people have all these tools all over the place, those tools might be things that are orchestration engines, other products that might be things that you run from the command line. Which work great together, but what you find is that, there's no central orchestration, and what we want to provide is that central orchestration that can run those other tools, and also schedule them together. So if you use other tools besides AO, that's fine. We're happy to bring them in, and you could use the variables, you could use everything that you still would use, but now you have all the integration, you have all the variables, you have all the workflow, and not only just from AO, but from Workload Manager too, so if you bring up a VM and bring up a container, you get that information. So there's just a lot of tooling inside that allows you to really take advantage of everything you might already even have. >> Correct, I mean that was a good demo, and one of the things I'd like to point out here is that, compared to some of the competitors that are out there with this orchestration engine, I don't want to name anyone particular, but if you look at it, the schema that Michael just showed us in that demo is JSON-based, versus others out there are some still in XML. The other very beneficial to this is that since this is a component of our CloudCenter Suite, it also gets installed on-prem, and what that means is footprint is extremely important when it comes to on-prem especially. And with the technology and the cloud-native solutions, that the team has done inside Cisco, our footprint is very small, due to the technology choices that we use in writing our services in Go, and et cetera, versus outside competitors are doing it in Java, which have a much more larger footprint on the infrastructure, that clients and customers get to install, so there are a lot of features with this orchestration engine that comes when we're trying to compare them with the market and the competitors of that are out there. Conditional logicking, what Michael just showed us inside the workflows, right, it makes it super simple for someone who has not had any experience coding, to put together the workflows and introduce conditions, either for loops or if else statements or conditional blocks, whereas in the competitors, you have to know a certain amount of programming skills in order for you to do those conditioning, so, I feel that that's a great advantage that we have here, so. >> And so does a lot of things come packaged out of the box? Standard processing, standard workflows, standard processes? >> Yep. >> And then what do they code it in, then, if it is a custom workflow that you don't have, how do they go in and manipulate the tool? >> Good question, because like I mentioned, competitors, you would have to know a certain language in order for you to code those logical flows that you want inside your orchestration, right? Inside AO, it's all driven by the DSO, which is all JSON-based, right, and the DSO is so powerful that you can introduce if and else conditions, you don't have to know a language per se, it's just you define your logic, right, and the tool actually allows you to provide those flows, those if conditions, the loops that are required, and also defaulting onto fallbacks or et cetera. >> Think Michael, you were going to show us a little bit more on that, and kind of set up some of these actions. >> Yeah, I think that's absolutely key, is that what we're talking about is extensibility here, so the extensibility is one thing that we kind of tout, because you don't need to be a programmer, but we live in an API world, so we need a way to consume these APIs. How do we do that in companies and businesses that think developer is expensive, and it's very hard to get into. So we're trying to take that out of that and say "Hey, we have this engine." So let's take a look at some of that extensibility on the next video that I have here. >> Jeff: Kay, pulling that up. >> Michael: So what you're seeing here is Postman. So this is a regular tool that a lot of people use, and what I'm showing is just a call, which is in Postman. And this particular call just gets a Smartsheet, so this gets a Smartsheet from Smartsheets, and it just lists what Smartsheets are available. And in AO, I want to be able to create this, and if we look at the timer, I'm doing this in less than five minutes. So I have no calls for Smartsheets, but I want to create a call, so what I did is I created a target for Smartsheets, that's an http target. And what that means is that I can connect to Smartsheets, and if you look at the bottom I list the API address, and I list the default path, so you don't have to enter that path a million times, so we know that API/2.0 is the path that we're always going to use. On top of that, there's always some other kind of element to that path that we're going to need in each particular action that we want to call. So what I'm going to do here is showcase what I did. So, in this first step, what I've done is I actually did a generic http request, so no programming needed, all I had to do is use a URL. People have used the World Wide Web, they know how to use URLs. In this one, the call is /sheets. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure this out. So, really I did /sheets is what I'm calling, and I'm using the target, and then the next step what I'm doing is I'm setting up a variable that's going to be my output variable, so what am I going to call this, maybe I'll call it Sheets, and really all I'm doing is just setting this up and saying that we are going to call this Sheets, going out of it, and that's about it. So what I've done within a couple minutes is created a new action that's going to be shown on the left-hand side. So now you can think of a reusable element, and what I'm showcasing here is I'm actually going to turn it off and turn it back on just to showcase, but there's something called atomic actions. So I'm just validating that this is running, I'm going to take a look at the atomic action, I'm going to give it a category, so I'm going to put this under the Smartsheet category, so if you can imagine, I had a lot of these Smartsheet actions, I could just put 'em all into one category where I'll find 'em on the left-hand side. But, I'm just going to validate that the atomic action is good, and now what I'm going to show you is that when I call up a new workflow, I could just drag that right from the left-hand side, and it'll be under Smartsheets, it'll be under get those lists, list Smartsheets, and what it's going to ask for now is a token, because you need a token in order to authenticate with Smartsheet, that's a Smartsheet requirement, so what I'm going to do is just go over to Postman, and grab that token real quick, and then come back over to this page and enter that token in. So, the first thing I'm going to do is create an input variable, and that input variable is going to ask for a token, so what that does is it, when I run this, in this particular workflow, I can ask for an input variable, and that means every time it runs it's going to pop up with that variable. Right now what you're seeing is I'm associating that variable that I created with that token parameter, and this is a secure string, so you can never see what that string is. It's hidden, it's made so that it's not ever seen. And so now if I run the run, you'll see it asks for a token. Now is actually when I'm going to go over to Postman, I'm going to grab that token, so you'll see I'm going into Postman, and Postman, again, is just what we use to test these calls, a lot of people use it, it's very industry-standard, and I'm just grabbing the token from here. It's blurred out so that the public can't see it, but I grabbed it, and now I'll go back out into here, and I hit run, and you'll see that I created that action, I brought the action into a workflow, I ran it, it's running, and now it's giving me that exact same output that I would've got in Postman, but now it's a reusable element. So this just illustrates the extensibility that's available within our product. Again, only took a couple of minutes, and I have an action that I might have needed that wasn't available in this tool, but it was created, and it works out of the box now. >> Very slick, and so that was with Smartsheets, how many connectors do you guys already have preconstructed? >> There are so many, I mean I don't want to list a lot of different vendors, but you can imagine every DevOps tool is in there, there are connections to Amazon, to Google, to Kubernetes, to, internally through ACI, through Meraki, through a lot of the Cisco ecosystem. So really, there's just a lot available, and it's growing, it's growing tremendously and we're building communities and we just want people to try it, use it, I think they'll really like it once they see what it can do. >> Yeah, and I'm just curious, Ali, is this something then that people are going to be working on all the time, or are these pretty much, you set your configs and go back to work, you set these relationships and go back to work, or is this, this is not your working screen. >> This is, I mean how cool was that, right, creating those atomic actions and being able to templatize those and building those building blocks like Lego, right, that in the future you can just build more and more out of, and just add to the complexity without it being complex at all, right? But going back to your question is, a lot of these toolings that are build with AO, one of the other advantages that we see that unfortunately some of the competitors don't have outside, is that you have the ability of four different type of events that inside AO is supported. So you, as DevOps engineers, they tie them up to scheduling, they tie them up to events coming in from a message queue, so these workflows that are created get triggered by these events, which makes it possible for them to execute at a certain time, or for a certain event that gets triggered, right, so again, reusable atomic workflows and actions that Michael just demonstrated, along with having both engineers and, application developers and DevOps, and I kind of stress it out, because of how flexible this is. For them to define it one time, and then have it reusable whenever they want. >> I'm just curious, what's the biggest surprise when you show this to people in the field? What do they get most excited about? >> They love it, they immediately say, "How can we start using it the next day?" And we also have, CloudCenter Suite has a SaaS offering where it's made it very easy for us to get them a trial access so that they can come in, get their foot wet and try it out. And once they start doing these calls and building these workflows and as Michael demonstrated, these actions where they perform API calls at the very least, they just get hooked to it, right, and then start using it from thereon. >> Michael, what about you, what's your favorite response from clients when you demo this, what's the one, two things that really grabs 'em, gets their attention, gets a big smile on their face? >> Yeah, well first and foremost you see people's minds spinning on what use cases have been bothering them that they haven't been able to fix, because maybe they're not programmers, or maybe they are, but it's just, they thought it would be too complex and too much work. So, I think it's just, it's so open-ended but you just see the interest in people's faces, it's like the first time, I have a three year old, the first time I gave him Legos and he's like, "I can build stuff, I can do stuff myself?" I mean it's just like that, I mean that's the amazing part of it is that it's so extensible, and to build onto what Ali was saying, there's so many ways to trigger it, too. So this can work standalone and work by itself, or it can be triggered by an API call, it can be scheduled, it could be called from Workload Manager, it can be triggered from a RabbitMQ, it could be triggered from Kafka. There's so many different things that you can do to trigger these workflows, that it just makes it so that it can integrate with other products, and you can integrate other products, so it really becomes that glue that kind of ties everything together, I mean we really really think about it as building blocks or Legos, or something like that. It just is really extensible, really easy to use, and we think it's a real game-changer. >> Great, all right, Ali, so last word, where do people go to get more information if they can't see that cool demo on that itty-bitty screen on their phone? >> So, we definitely recommend them to go to CloudCenter Suite, if you easily Google it on Cisco website or on Google itself, you'll see it apart from first or second links, but definitely check out CloudCenter Suite, Action Orchestrator is where you would like to visit and learn more about this tool and this component. >> All right, well thanks for stopping by, and thanks for joining us from New Jersey, Michael. >> Oh, thank you, and I'll send you a cheese steak. >> All right. I don't know if I want that in the mail, but we'll see if we can maybe fast shipment, all right, thanks again for stopping by, he's Ali G, he's Michael, I'm Jeff and you're watching theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studios, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. 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>>From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE conversation >>and welcome back. You're ready. Jeffrey here with the cue. We're in our Palo Alto studio today for a Q conversation that a little bit of a deeper dive into the Cisco cloud center. We've had an ongoing conversation. There's a, a new component today. We're going to do a deep dive, so we're excited to welcome back to the studio. Uh, Kube alumni, uh, Ali G technical leaders software engineering group from Cisco. All great to see you again. Happy to be here. Absolutely. And joining us from New Jersey via the phone is Michael Chenoweth's. He's a technical marketing engineer from Cisco. Michael, great to see you. Hey rich, see you guys. And I hope you'll go get a cheese steak when they're finished and uh, after grad how you can send it to me. I don't know if that's possible, but uh, yeah. Anyway, welcome. Uh, so let's jump into it. So Cisco cloud center we've been talking about for a while, but today we want to dig into a very specific feature and it's a, it goes technically by a O, but that stands for the action orchestrator Ali. What's action orchestrator? >>Well, action orchestration is a component inside our cloud center suite that brings together cross domain orchestration and it's extremely useful because not only is it valuable for dev ops engineers to orchestrate and maintain and automate their infrastructure, but it's also useful for application developers to define workflow and orchestration in their products as well. So this tool, um, is heavily used throughout the stock, inside the cloud, at the application level, all the way down to the intro level as well. And um, uh, it's made it extremely easy for DevOps engineers to get their hands on the fining workflows and, uh, conditions and logics where they can create, maintain all the appropriate infrastructure that they need. Works very well hand to hand with the current, uh, technology out there like Terraform or Ansible. And, um, it's part of our CloudCenter suites. Huh. >>And is it more on the config side or is it more on kind of the operational workflow side? Correct. >>So it could be used for both. Right. It's so flexible in a matter of, I'm this abstraction of having the orchestration engine outside, uh, enables both developers and dev ops engineers to illustrate and create their workflows. Um, uh, rather, it's again, based on infrastructure or, uh, even networking layers or all the way up the side to the application where if your product requires an orchestration engine in the backend to process work, this, uh, this component definitely plays a big role. Right? So, >>okay, Michael, throw it over to you. >>Yeah, so I think everything that a Ali is saying is absolutely correct. Um, the nice part about it is it's, it's, >>you know, >>it's a product that can really do whatever you imagined. So, I mean, we've seen people use it for business process, for a automation of network, server, cloud, whatever you can think of. It's, it's, um, you know, it's extensible. We're gonna talk about that in a little bit. But really the, the nice part about it is you create the workflows and you designed the way that you want to go. And what I have here, if you could show the next, uh, video is just a little clip of what it would look like to go through a workup. Well, okay, so let's go queue that up and we'll uh, we'll take a walk for it. Let's go to the video number one guys. All right. So yeah, so if you look here, what we're seeing is we're seeing a pre, a view of what Amazon looked like, a beforehand looking at VPCs and subnets. >>And now what we're doing is going through a workflow that is going to show afterwards that those actual VPCs and subnets were created by using a flow. So we're going to do is just pick one flow here, which is called creative for us. And this is just an example. And what you see on the left hand side is something called actions. So these are all the atomic actions that are available. A, but these are just out of the box. We're adding stuff all the time. And these actions can be dragged over to the right and create workflows. And then just think about it as if it's not there, we can create, you can create them in minutes. And we're going to show you that in a little bit too. So right now what I'm gonna show you is the fact that if you click on each one of these actions, there's actually some kind of uh, information that you'll see on the right hand side. >>And this information is how you and figure that particular action. So this particular one's going to create a VPC and you can see the VPC name, you could see the VPC sub-net, um, and whatever other parameters are needed for that particular action. So not a lot to do. You pretty much select the target. And this one already had a target selected, which is Amazon or AWS. And the second action here, if you look down, actually has a parameter two or a couple parameters and one of those parameters you can see the first one is just the name. The second one though is actually using a variable from the previous step. So really, really easy to map stuff different workflow elements and it allows you to quickly kind of glue things together to make things work. So this is just an example again, very simple example that this is going to create infrastructure on Amazon. >>And you can think about using this as part of the process. Like when you're trying to bring up a cloud environment, maybe you run this first, if you run this to say, Hey, I need some infrastructure for that cloud environment and maybe you even want to execute, um, you know, bringing up certain VMs or containers, you can do that afterwards. But this was just a really, really quick showcase. Oh, a simple thing you can do with very few steps that you can then run and it will actually, we're going to run, hit validate here. It just validates the workflow. But once we click around here, it's actually going to create all of that stuff within Amazon. So in the next, in this step, you're going to see the run. You can see that both steps work because they're green. If they didn't work, they'd be red. >>And we're going to show that in one second. Um, but when you click on a step, it actually shows you the input and output of each one of those steps. So it's really, really cool on that all the information that you could possibly think of that you'll need to, to troubleshoot, to look at these things is available in the workflow by just clicking on each one of these steps and seeing what that input and output. So if you can imagine if you had an error there, uh, you could quickly figure out what that is. It would tell you the error, it would tell you what's going on, or if you needed information from a step before you can run it, get the information from the step before and then figure out what values you need for the next step. So really, really cool in that you could look at this workflow, you get all the information you need and it allows you to create these workflows and kind of glue them together really, really quick. >>Uh, and now what I'm going to show you, I believe is in the next part here. I'm just going to illustrate that. If you go over to the runs that we have here, it'll actually keep a list of all of the different runs we did. And you could see one is in red. Well that one in red means that a step didn't work well. Let's click on that step and figure out, Hey, why didn't this step work? Well, this step didn't work because of an error that we got. And if we scroll down to the bottom over here, what we're going to see is the actual error that are had had occurred within this step. So now we know exactly what the problem was and we can fix it within the next step. So in this particular one, um, we, we illustrated right there, uh, that there was some problem with, uh, I think a VPC, um, or the way that I, I sorry, the way that I phrase that VPC or that's something that I'm sorry. >>And uh, it, it, it positive problem, but I fixed it within the next step in. Now you can see that in these declare two screens that the VPC and the sudden that was created automatically within that workflow. Pretty cool. So what, what would they have done to accomplish that in the past? So there'll come a sound the past, and this is the real thing that, that we see. We see that people have all these tools all over the place. Those tools might be, you know, things that are uh, orchestration engines, you know, other products that it might be things, uh, that, uh, they run from the command line, uh, which are, you know, work great together. But what we find is that, you know, there's no central orchestration and when we want to provide is that central orchestration that can run those other tools and also schedule them together. >>So if you use a, if you use other tools besides a AAO, that's fine. We're happy to bring them in. And we could, you could use the valuables, you could use everything that's, that you still use. Okay, now you have all the integration, you have all the variables, you have all the workflow. And not only just for Mayo but from workload manager too. So if you bring up a VM and and bring up a container, you get that information. So there's just a lot of uh, you know, tooling inside that allows you to really take advantage of them. Everything you might already even have. >>Yeah, correct. I mean that was a good demo. And, uh, one of the things I like to point out here is that compared to some of the competitors that are out there with this orchestration engine, uh, I don't want to name anyone particular, but if you look at it, the schema that Michael just showed us in that demo is Jason Bass versus others out. There are some still in XML. The other very beneficial to this is that since this is a component of our cloud center suite, it also gets installed on prem. And what that means is footprint is extremely important when it comes to OnPrem especially. And, uh, with the technology and the cloud native solutions that you know, the team has done inside Cisco, our footprint is very small, uh, due to the technology choices that we use. And writing our services and go and et cetera versus outside competitors are doing it in Java, which have a much more larger footprint on, you know, the infrastructure that clients and customers get to insult. >>So there are a lot of features, uh, with this orchestration engine, uh, that comes when it, uh, when we're trying to compare them with the market and the competitors that are out there. Conditional logic in what Michael just showed us inside the workflows, right. It makes it super simple for someone who has not had any experience coding to put together their workflows and introduced conditions, um, either for loops or if L statements are conditional blocks, whereas in the competitors you have to know a certain amount of programming skills in order for you to do those conditionings. So I feel that that's a great advantage that we have here. So, >>and so do you does a lot of things come packaged out of the box kind of standard processes, standard standard workflows and our processes. Yup. And then what do they coat it in then? If, if, if it is a, a custom workflow that you don't have, how do they go in and manipulate the tool? >>Good question. Because I'm like I mentioned, right? The competitors, you would have to know a certain language in order for you to code those, a logical flows that you want inside your orchestration, right? Inside EO, it's all driven by the DSL, which is all Jason base, right? And the GSL, the DSLR is so powerful that you can introduce if an ELs conditions, you don't have to know a language per se, right? It's just you define your logic, right. And um, the tool actually allows you to provide those flows, those if conditions of the loops, uh, that are required and also defaulting onto fallbacks or etc. So, right. >>I think Becca, you're going to show us a little bit more that, uh, >>yeah, I think that's, that's absolutely key is that, you know, what we're talking about is extensibility here. So the extensibility is, is one thing that we kind of tell because you don't need to be a programmer, but we live in an API world. So we need a way to consume these API. How do we do that in, and you know, companies and businesses that think developer is expensive and it's very hard to get into. So we're trying to take that out of that and say, Hey, we have this engine. So let's take a look at some of that extensibility on the next video that I have here. >>Okay. Pulling that up. So what you're seeing here, uh, is, uh, postmaster. So this is a regular tool that a lot of people use. And what I'm showing is just appall, which is, which is in boost Matt. And this particular call just gets a Smartsheet. So this gets a Smartsheet, uh, from Smartsheets and it just lists what Smartsheets are available and yeah, in a, Oh, I want to be able to create this. And if we look at the time, or I'm doing this in less than five minutes, so I have no calls for Smartsheets, but I want to create a call. So what I did is I created a target for Smartsheets that's an HTTP target. And what that means is that I can connect to Smartsheets and if you look at the bottom, I list the API a address and I list the default path. >>So you don't have to enter that path a million times. So we know that API slash 2.0 is the path that we're always going to use. On top of that, there's always some other kind of, uh, element to that path that you know we're going to need in each particular action that we want to call. So what I'm going to do here is showcase what I did. So in this first step, what I've done is I actually did a generic HTTP requests. So no programming needed. All I had to do is use a URL. People have used the worldwide web, they know how to use URLs. And this one, the cause slash sheets doesn't take a lot of, you know, um, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure this out. So ah, really I did slash sheets is, is what I'm calling. And um, you know, I'm using the target and then the next step when I'm doing is I'm setting up a variable that's going to be my output variables. >>So what am I gonna call this? Maybe I'll call it sheets. And really all I'm doing is just setting this up and saying that we are going to call this Sheetz going out of it. And that's about it. So what I've done within a couple minutes is created a new action that's going to be shown on the left hand side. So now you can think of a reusable element. And what I'm showcasing here is I'm actually gonna turn it off and turn it back on just to showcase. But there's something called atomic actions. So I'm just validating that this is running. I'm going to take a look at the atomic action. I'm going to give it a category. So I'm going to put this, the Smartsheet category. So if you could imagine I had a lot of these, a Smartsheet actions, I could just put them all into one category. >>We'll find them on the left hand side, but I'm just going to validate that the atomic action is good. And now what I'm going to show you is that when I call up a new workflow, I can just drag that right from the left hand side and it'll be under smart sheets. It'll be under, you know, get those lists are uh, Smartsheet, um, lists Smartsheets and what it's going to ask for. Now as a token, because you need a token in order to, uh, authenticate with Smartsheet. That's a Smartsheet requirement. So what I'm gonna do is just go over to postman and uh, grabbed that token real quick and um, and then come back over to this page and enter that token in. So, uh, the, the first thing I gonna do is create an input variable and that input variable is going to ask for a token. >>So what that does is it, when I run this in this particular workflow, I could ask for an input variable. And that means every time it runs, it's going to pop up with that variable right now where you're seen as an associate in that variable that I created with that token parameter. And this is a secure string so you can never see what that string is. It's hidden, it's a, you know, it's a, it's made so that it's, it's not ever seen. And um, so now if I run the run, you'll see it asks for a token. Now is actually when I'm going to go over to postman. I'm going to grab that to again a, so you'll see I'm going into postman and post again is just what we use to test these calls. A lot of people use it. It's very industry standard. >>Uh, and I'm just grabbing the token from here. Uh, it's blurred out so that, so that though public can't see it. But I grabbed it and then we'll go back out into here and I hit run and you'll see that I created that action. I brought the accidents who workflow, I ran it, it's running and now it's giving me that exact same output that I would've gotten in postman. But now it's a reusable element. So this just illustrates the extensibility that's available within our product. Again, when we took a couple of minutes and I have an action that I might've needed that wasn't available in this tool, but it was created and it, uh, you know, it works out in the box now, so >>very slick. And so that was with, uh, with Smartsheets, how many connectors do you guys already have pre constructed? >>There are so many. I mean, you know, I don't want to list a lot of different vendors, but you could imagine every dev ops tool is in there. Um, there are connections to Amazon, to Google too, uh, to Coopernetties, to, um, to internally through ACI, through Muraki, through a lot of the Cisco ecosystem. So really there's, there's just a lot available, uh, and it's growing. It's grown tremendously and we're building communities and we just want people to try it, use it, I think really like it. Once they see what it can do. >>Yeah. And I'm just curious all, is this something that then that people are going to be working on all the time or these pretty much, you know, you set your configs and go, go back to work, you set these relationships and go back to work or is this, this is not your work screen, >>this is, I mean, how cool was that, right? Creating those atomic actions and being able to templatize those and, and, and building those building blocks like Lego, right, that in the future you can just build more and more out of and just either add to the complexity without it being complex at all. Right. Um, but going back to your question is a lot of these toolings that are built, um, with EO, the, uh, one of the other advantages that we see that unfortunately some of the competitors don't have outside, um, is that you have the ability of, for different types of events that inside AOL is supportive. So, you know, you as dev ops engineers, they tied them up to scheduling, they tied them up to events coming in from a message queue. So these are workflows that are created get, uh, triggered by these events, which, uh, you know, makes it possible for them to execute at a certain time or for a certain event that gets triggered. Right? So, uh, again, uh, re-usable, uh, Automic workflows and actions that Michael just demonstrated along with, um, having, uh, both engineers and the both engineers, both application developers and dev ops, and I kind of stress it out because how flexible this is, right. Um, for them to define it one time and then have it reusable whenever they want. Right. >>I'm just curious, what's the biggest surprise when you show this to people in the field? Um, what do they get most excited? >>They love it. I mean cut. They immediately say, how can we start using it the next site? Right. And, um, it's, uh, you know, we also have a cloud center suite has a SaaS offering where it's, uh, made it very easy for us to, uh, get them a trial access. So that they can come in, get their foot wet, you know, and try it out. Right. And once they start doing these calls and building these workflows and uh, as a Michael demonstrated these actions where they perform API calls at the very least, right. Uh, they just get hooked to it. Right. And then start using it from their answer. Right. >>Mike, what about you? What's your, uh, what's your favorite response from, from clients when you demo this? W what's the one, two things that really, uh, that really grabs them, gets their attention and gets a big smile on their face? >>Yeah. Well, first and foremost, you see people's minds spinning on, like what use cases have been bothering them that they haven't been able to, to, to like fix, you know, because maybe they're not programmers or maybe they are, but you know, it's just, they thought it would be too complex and too much work. So, you know, I think it's just, it's, it's so open-ended, but you just, the interest in people's faces. It's like the first time, you know, I have a three year old, it's the first time I gave him Legos and he's like, you, I can build stuff. I can do stuff myself. I mean, it's just like that. I mean that's the amazing part of it is that it's so extensible and to build on to what Ali was saying, uh, you know, there's so many ways to trigger it too. So this can work standalone and work by itself. >>Or it can be triggered by an API call. It could be scheduled, it could be called from workload manager. It can be, uh, you know, it can be triggered from a, you know, a rabid. It could be triggered from PACA. There's so many different things that you can do to trigger these workflows that it just makes it so that it can integrate with other products and you can integrate other products. Right? So it really becomes that glue that kind of ties everything together. I mean, we really, really think about it as building blocks or Legos or something like that. Um, it just is really extensible, really easy to use. And you know, we think it's a real game changer. >>Great. All right. All a last word. Where do people go to get more information if they can't see that cool demo on that DVD screen on their phone? >>So, um, we definitely recommend them to go to cloud center suite. Uh, you know, if you easily Google it on Cisco, uh, website or on Google itself, you know, you'll see it, uh, apart from, uh, first or second links. But definitely check out CloudCenter suite action orchestrator is where you would like to visit and learn more about this tool and this component. So. >>All right, well thanks for, uh, for stopping by and uh, thanks for joining us from New Jersey, Michael. Oh, thank you. And I'll send you a cheese. All right. I'm, I don't know if I want that in the mail, but we'll see. We can make fast shit, but all right. Thanks again for stopping by. He's only T's Michael. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're in our Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. >>okay.

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in our Palo Alto studio with two great guests from Cisco as we talk about a content series around cloud, cloud management, cloud orchestration, and interesting cloud native. It's a cloud native world, hybrid multicloud. Two great guests, Matt Ferguson, director of cloud management orchestration at Cisco, and Ali G, technical leader in software engineering. Guys, thanks for coming on, good to see you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Yeah, tanks for having us. >> Sporting the nice Kubernetes shirt there. Of course I'm jealous. (laughs) Great shirt because we'll be at KubeCon, so looking forward to that. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> We'll be there, too. >> So thanks. Matt, first start with you. You're the director of product management. You see the whole portfolio. What makes up the Cloud Center Suite? What are the components, let's get that out. >> Yeah, no, thanks, I appreciate that. Cloud Center is really our cloud management platform. It's a suite of products, quite candidly, and in the suite we have a Workload Manager module that is about taking workloads and modeling them out in blueprints, and then actually targeting them to very specific infrastructures, whether that's on-prem or in a public cloud, so that's module number one. The second module is our Action Orchestrator product, and this is an orchestration platform that can take various elements of code, of script, and take functions and actually sort of apply those with various different sort of capabilities to either set up infrastructure, or you know, do other sort of capabilities. And the third product in the suite is Cost Optimizer, and this is about understanding how much you're spending. It's understanding budgets, it's trying to categorize that in the public space. We can also apply that into an on-prem and how much you might want to sort of target that. We have, so that's the suite, and the suite is a combination of either self-hosted, so you can actually sort of like download the software and then self-host it on-prem, or we also have a SaaS platform, or SaaS-hosted capabilities for the Cloud Center. >> And the market's growing like crazy. You guys are doing a lot of product work. We've done a great interview with Ryan Hart from your team on the business benefits, but there's a lot of technical product managers out there, or cloud architects, people who are actually in the trenches, who need to look under the hood and figure out if this kind of is going to fit their environment. Ali, you've been, you know, a developer, you are a developer. At the end of the day all the talk on the marketing side is about the benefits. When they come in to you and they say, "Okay, implement this." >> Right. >> Does it work together, can it work by itself, I mean, can you mix and match? Take us through what it means for the folks who have to implement or design around the platform. >> Absolutely, so (clears throat) as a developer, you know, when we're coding it's key that we take our thoughts and ideas and as soon as we can bring it up to a POC, because normally we're working in an Agile fashion, and in two-week sprints at the end of the sprint you have to do a demo. So in order to achieve that this suite gives the capability of taking away any blockers that a developer may have, so a lot of times the developers and the teams already set up their tools around Jenkins and different CI components that they have, which is great but you know, me being in that part of the work and we hit roadblocks where failures happened, right, and we have to have our eye on the builds. And unfortunately there are manual, you know, interactions that we have to do retries. It would be great if the system was fault tolerant. Now that doesn't mean that we have to completely remove what we've done inside our CICDs, right? We've spent so much time, however if we can bring item potent commands and loose couple them a little bit and use the suite in order for us to do some of the work and give us that fault tolerancy, that'll be great, and that's what Cloud Center Suite has to offer, right? As Matt pointed out, you know, there are different components to it. You have the Workload Manager which sets up the infrastructure, but then you have AO, Action Orchestrator, which is the orchestration engine. Where I strongly believe that picking out an orchestration engine, either for you CICD and devops work, or even at the application level for development, becomes challenging, right? Does it support all the features that I have, does it have the patterns that does fault tolerancy, does threshold settings and retries? Does it do circuit breaker patterns, you know, does it take care of everything? So having that AO being your center of orchestration, both for your devops and your application, I feel that plays a strong role as a developer, right? >> So talk about the orchestration engines. I want to unpack, there's a lot there. I want to just kind of-- >> Yeah. >> Unpack it a little bit. Okay, so I'm a developer, I'm like, okay. I'm working hard, I've got the cloud architecture, I've got some cloud native, and every single day a new thing comes over the transit. "Try this new tool, it's going to be killer." Orchestration you mentioned is a buzzword that's been kicked around a lot. Obviously some people try to say, "Orchestration's about Kubernetes." Some people say no, orchestration's about a lot of other things within the enterprise, so IT is starting to get this orchestration fatigue of meaning. What is, when you say orchestration engine, what is it specifically applying to, because certainly there's orchestration within containers with Kubernetes-- >> Absolutely. >> And you're wearing, supporting the shirt. >> Right. >> But it's more than that, what does that mean for me? I'm the person in the trenches, I'm making it happen. >> No, that's a great question. The reason it's a great question is because orchestration means different things at different levels, and you brought up a good point, like Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an orchestration, but it's a container orchestrator, correct? But I'm looking at Action Orchestrator acting as the orchestration for your devops activity, as part of your CICD. Not everything needs to be inside our CIs, whether as if they're command patterns that are item potent and designed, that could move into the Action Orchestrator so that we can leverage retries and have the system be fault tolerant, that's one thing. The other thing is if you're building an application that requires orchestration, that has a workflow, that requires some requests that are given to the application to be processed at the backend, right? That could also leverage this Action Orchestrator engine as well, so you're absolutely right that orchestration is there, for example, in Kubernetes, but that falls into the context of containers, whether as this falls into the context of developers. Does that-- >> Yeah, makes total sense. I mean, fault tolerance you mentioned, you mentioned loosely coupled. >> Right. >> What do you mean by that, because I get loosely coupled. Anyone that designs OSs knows. You want to couple things and make things highly cohesive. Great practice in a systems architecture. What do you mean by loosely coupled, what's the impact of me as I'm trying to figure out my devops, I've got developers pipelining. What does that mean, loosely coupled? >> So when it goes to keeping loosely coupled is if you look at today how let's say I would have done it in my team, and we've done this before, right, is that we'd set up a pipeline in our CI environment where we're performing unit testing and then we're performing integration testing, but then we're also building, packaging, pushing the containers up to the registries, right? What happens where the endpoint registry is down, there is no retries, right, there is no capability of the system knowing how to heal itself. Okay, so keeping loosely coupled in this sense is why not I keep a lot of my UT and integration testing remaining inside Jenkins, which I've done already a lot of investment in, right? I don't want to remove it, right? However, if I bring those third party connection calls that we're doing inside the orchestration which the system heals itself, that's where I see the loose coupleness that can definitely benefit us here. >> Talk about third party. Matt, you talk about it first from a product perspective because you have the roadmap to deal with. Obviously Cisco has legacy positions in the enterprise. You guys are number one in networking, in other areas. Now the cloud native world, so you got to deal with third parties. You guys have done that, been multivendor in the past. There's a business and technical impact in connecting. >> Right. >> As the world's getting faster and more microservice-oriented, what does that mean, third party? What does it mean to be third party connected? >> Yeah, it's a great question. So we're going through this, you know, transition as well where we have to enable the development community as they're going through their proof of concepts, as they're becoming more Agile, as they're actually doing the true continuous integration, the continuous delivery of that proof of concept that ultimately will land into production. So what we want to provide is the tools in order to, you know, provide either the line of business owner or the business element of the IT organization of, you know, maybe the cost associated with, you know, how much it's, you know, that particular development effort is taking, you know, by looking at how much their, you know, that public cloud provider's charging. We might be able to leverage different infrastructures, so you could leverage the, you know, on-prem and in the cloud, the public cloud, and so with Cloud Center you're able to actually take either, in Workload Manager you're able to actually set up, you know, that infrastructure and place that workload there. You're able to use Action Orchestrator to glue a variety of different either scripts or languages, or you know, whatever element that the developer is friendly or familiar with, and then you're also to actually leverage the cost associated. So I get an update on how much this is costing me as the developer is going through their cycle. >> All right, Ali, let's attack that statement. Glue, who doesn't like a glue layer? But at the expense of throwing away what I got is not cool. Like people don't want-- >> Absolutely. >> They want to be, I love to create more opportunities to glue things together, make it more integrated with data modeling going back and forth, I love that. How does your customer, in this case a devops or a developer or a technical architect, get the best of a glue layer-like feature at the same time not compromising any disruption to how they do their business? >> Perfect, so a lot of the work that they already invested inside their devops work could be there. However, like I mentioned about the orchestration section is that the ability to introduce any custom adapters are also available, correct, so there are out-of-the-box adapters for Ansible, Terraform, and many more, for RESTful API calls, and if a team requires to do a custom adapter creation via an SDK that they have inside they can simply implement it because of the interface that's available. So that's where I feel that the glue is where it comes to the orchestration level. Now where Matt pointed out on the Cost Optimizer this is very key because the realtime data that Cost Optimizer is providing from the underlying clusters that we have our services running provides us, if you tie that, and ending out I want to use the word 'glue' here, if you tie that with the orchestration engine you can do realtime system decision making on knowing that the next service that you're introducing, now think about it, when we're talking about huge companies, right, 200-plus microservices, you know, we're not talking about one or two, and there are out there, and when we're talking about those number of microservices cost becomes important. Where should I be able to push the next service? Should I push it, if it's in my public cloud should I go to Azure or should I go to AWS, right? And cost is a key factor there as well, right? >> Explain cost, I mean cost is cash, but there's also cost in code, there's cost in operations. Do you mean cost in terms of actually hard dollars, are you talking about cost of the service, impact to the system, or both? I mean, why do I care if I'm a technical person? Hey, someone else is paying the bills. >> Correct, so a couple of things as a technical person's concerned is that when it comes down to, costs aside, but where the orchestrator actually plays a role and when it comes to where deployment needs to happen on which cloud is key. As a technical person sometimes our environments and our persistence layers that we have services connecting to require only access to private data, so it cannot go into the public sector. So that service needs to be deployed onto the private cloud. Whereas you have other services that have to live on the edge because they communicate with the internal cloud, so those services need to be pushed onto that public. So it's here that the suite basically gives you the opportunity to do all of that automatically without any, you know, interference at all. >> And you know, and I'll just dive in. I mean, I think the thing that, you know, if I was a line of business owner, right, I'm really looking for my developer community, my team to move faster. I don't want to necessarily slow them down, so I want to be able to say, "Hey, if there is a service within Azure, "if there is something within Google Cloud "that really helps you develop either faster "or provides a service that makes "the functionality of the experience better," I want the developer to be able to use that as a target infrastructure. At the same time, you know, I also want to go, "Okay, so as we're building out this application "or this service, is it growing out of bounds in cost, "is this something that I can actually "sort of take to production," and then I have an awareness of exactly when they go through the unit test, the integration test, how much this is actually going to cost. >> It's a fascinating conversation, certainly on our next segment when we do more of these interviews I'd love to drill into technical debt, but I'll ask you guys while you're here, technical debt is something that developers are used to dealing with, especially when they want to go from idea to POC, you take chances, there's technical debt and people have a good form for balancing debt. Cost also factors into things like that, and we add microservices to the equation, there's services going up and down, you don't know what's happening. So automation comes into a big part of this. So this idea of getting from point A to point B, whether it's idea to POC or POC to production, there's sometimes technical debt involved, there's sometimes thinking around that. How does the platform help there? Is that something that you guys help developers with? Because that's some, I'll take a chance. If I want to get a POC up and running maybe I take some technical debt to try to get it going, then I'll fill it in after. (laughs) >> Right, so I think like Matt mentioned about the different components that play inside the suite, you know, you have the infrastructure handled by Workload Manager, you have your orchestration again by AO, you have Cost Optimizer providing cost. The ability to set up your system inside these components and then creating a template out of it so that later when you want to challenge technical debt you're not reinventing things, so you already have templates created. So going back and dealing with technical debt is about how you can take your templates to the next version. >> And that's in line with devops thinking, iteration. >> Exactly. >> You know, just keep it Agile, keep it going. What's your guy's take on automation? Obviously when you look at the biggest trends in multicloud and hybrid cloud you have two things pop up in this new cloud architecture, observability and automation are two hot trends, which is essentially, observability's just network management on steroids and automation's configuration management on steroids, (chuckles) so the world's kind of the same but evolving. I mean this is in your, both are in your wheelhouse for Cisco as a company. >> Yeah, and another element that I think we haven't really talked about was, you know, we have a container platform that actually will leverage the APIs to either the public cloud or on-prem to like an ESXi host on VMware, and what that provides is to leverage the best of where that particular service would reside. If it's on-prem because of particular use cases, of data sovereignty or just locality, you know, hey, put your workload there. If you want to leverage something that's in the public cloud because of a service or something, we're not actually putting a cluster on AWS, we're leveraging EKS, we're connecting via APIs. You know, the cluster that you are controlling from the control plane all the way to the workload or the worker node, it would actually be spun up within EKS. So we're trying to bridge that on-prem world to the public cloud, so very much hybrid cloud, the connectivity piece and being able then to understand, you know, the connectivity and the workloads that go there. >> Bridge, an old school term. >> Bridge, yes. >> It means something. >> Yes. >> Bridge. >> Yes. >> Gateways. >> Yes. >> Internetworking. >> Yes. >> Cloud, same movie, different generation, isn't it? >> Yeah. (laughs) (laughs) >> You got it. >> I mean they're moving up the stack a bit. >> Yeah. >> But this is serious, this is going on. People want to have things move around. It takes a lot of networking knowledge, but it's all being done now with software with a lot of automation abstraction. This is why I think the devops and the net devops world, whatever we're calling it, is really creating this new abstraction layer. So great conversation, let's bring it all together and end this up. Bottom line I'm a technical person. I have responsibility, my boss is saying, "Go faster, be Agile, be devops," but we've got all this legacy to deal with. Why Cisco platform, what's the bottom line? >> With the container platform what we're trying to do is enable IT to have the tools that they can actually enable the speed and agility for their developers, and that's really the bottom line. And we're trying to, you know, just basically empower and move at the speed of Agile, so IT is now a part of the process of innovation and proof of concepting. I know the challenge though is governance, policy, security, all the things, the connectivity. Those are the elements that we're bringing to the table for the IT, you know, ops organization that can also sort of like go, "I am able to provide that for their developers." >> And Ali, your perspective, you're one of us. You're a technical brother. What's the bottom line, why should I take a chance, why should I implement this platform? >> Because developers really want to code at the end of the day, and they want to just focus on their business logic. They want the system to be automated. They want the system to be self-healed, and just like what Matt said, right, this suite basically gives you that so that you just focus on your code and your business logic, nothing else. >> Awesome, guys, great conversation. Looking forward to following up. I think there's a lot to unpack. I think as this cloud 2.0 world, or whatever it's being called, is about modernization of the enterprise, and it's going to be around for a long, long time. Thanks for sharing your expert opinions and commentary, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> This is theCUBE here in Palo Alto for a CUBE conversation. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World 2019. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Furrier. We're joined by Ali Ghodsi, he is the CEO of Databricks, thank you so much for coming on, for returning to theCUBE. You're a CUBE veteran. >> Yes, thank you for having me. >> So I want to pick up on something that you said up on the main stage, and that is that every enterprise on the planet wants to add AI capabilities, but the hardest part of AI is not AI, it's the data. >> Yeah. >> Can you riff on that a little bit for our viewers? Elaborate? >> Yeah, actually, the interesting part is that, if you look at the company that succeeded with AI, the actual AI algorithms they're using, are actually algorithms from the 70s, you know, they're actually developed in the 70s, that's 50 years ago. So then how come they're succeeding now? When actually the same algorithms weren't working in the 70s, so people gave up on them. Like, these things called neural nets, right? Now they're en vogue and they're, you know, super successful. The reason is you have to apply orders of magnitude more data. If you feed those algorithms that we thought were broken orders of magnitude more data, you actually get great results, but that's actually hard. You know, dealing with petabyte scale data and cleaning it, making sure that it's actually the right data for the task at hand is not easy. So that's the part that people are struggling with. >> I saw you up on stage, I'm like ah, Ali's here, Databricks is here, that's awesome. Psyched that you stopped by theCUBE. Been a while. I wanted to get a quick update, 'cause you guys have been on a tear, doing some great work at Cal, we were just told before we came on camera. But what are you doing here? What's the, is there any announcements or news with Informatica? What's the story? >> Yeah, it's, we're doing partnership around Delta Lake, which is our next generation engine that we built, so we're super excited about that. It integrates with all of the Informatica platform. So their ingestion tools, their transformation tools, and the catalog that they also have. So we think together, this can actually really help enterprises make that transition into the AI era. >> So you know, we've been followers, our 10th year, so remember when we were in the cloud era office of Mike Olsen and Amr Awadallah when we first started and now, Hadoop movement started, and then the cloud came along. Right when you guys started your company, the cloud growth took off. You guys were instrumental in changing the equation in dealing with data, data lakes, whatever they're calling it back then. So now, data, holistically, is a systems architecture. On premise it's a huge challenge, cloud native, well no real challenge, people love that. Data feeds AI, lot of risk taking, lot of reward. We're seeing the SaaS business explode, Zoom communications. The list goes on and on. Do you know, enterprise that's trying to be SAS is hard. So you can't just take data from an enterprise and make it SaaS-ified. You really got to think differently. What are you guys doing? How have you guys evolved and vectored into that challenge, because this is where your core value proposition initially started change. Take us through that Databricks story and how you're solving that problem today. >> Yeah, it's a great question. Really what happened is that people started collecting a lot of our data about a decade ago. And the promise was, you can do great things with this. There are all these aspirational use cases around machine learning, real time, it's going to be amazing. Right? So people started collecting it. They started storing one petabytes, two petabytes, and they kept going back to their boss and saying this project is real successful I now have five petabytes in it. But at some point the business said, okay that's great but what can you do with it? What business problems are you actually addressing? What are you solving? And so, in the last couple years there's been a push towards let's prove the value of these data lakes. And actually, many of these projects are falling short. Many are failing. And the reason is, people have just been dumping this data into data lakes without thinking about, the structure, the quality, how it's going to be used. The use cases have been an afterthought. So the number one thing in the top of mind for everyone right now is how do we make these data lakes that we have successful so we can prove some business value to our management? Towards this, this is the main problem that we're focusing on. Towards this, we built something called Delta Lake. It's something you situate on top of your data lake. And what it does is it increases the quality, the reliability, the performance, and the scale of your data lake. >> (John) So it's like a filter. >> Yeah. >> The cream rises to the top. >> (Ari) Exactly. >> Let's the sludge, the data swamp stay below the clean water, if you will. >> Exactly actually you nailed it. So basically, we look at the data as it comes in, filter as you said, and then look at, if there's any quality issues we then put it back in the data lake. It's fine, it can stay there. We'll figure out how to get value out of it later. But if it makes it into the Delta Lake, it will have high quality. Right? So that's great. And since we're anyway already looking at all the data as it's coming in, we might as well also store a lot of inducees and a lot of things that let us performance optimize it later on. So that, later, when people are actually trying to use that data they get really high performance, they get really good quality. And we also added asset transactions to it so that now you're also getting all those transactional use cases working on your existing data lake. >> I saw, at my daughter's graduation in Cal Berkley this weekend and yesterday, people around with Databricks backpacks. Very popular in academic. You guys got the young generation coming in. What's the update on the company? How many employees? What's the traction? Give us a quick business update. >> Yeah we're about 800 employees now. About 100 people in Europe, I would say, and maybe 40-50 people in Asiapac. We're expanding the ME and the Asia business. >> (John) Growth mode. >> Yeah, growth mode. So it's expanding as fast as possible. I mean, I actually, as a CEO, I try to always, slow the hiring down to make sure that we keep the quality bars. So that's actually top of mind for me. But yeah we're-- >> (John) You did Delta Lake on that one. >> Yeah (laughing) >> Exactly. Yeah and we're super excited about working with these universities. We get a lot of graduate students from top universities-- >> And Cal had the first ever class in college of data analytics, what was that? Data analytics are the first inagaural class graduated. Shows how early it is. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. And actually used Databricks, the community edition, for a class of over a thousand students at Cal used the platform. So they're going to be trained in data science as they come out. >> So I want to ask about that because as you said you're trying to slow down the hiring to make sure that you are maintaining a high bar for your new hires. But yet, I'm sure there's a huge demand because you are in growth mode. So what are you doing? You said you're working with universities to make sure that the next generation is trained up and is capable of performing at Databricks. So tell us more about those efforts. >> Yeah I mean, so, obviously university recruiting is big for us. Cal, I think Databricks has the longest line of all the companies that come there on the career fair day. So, we work very closely with these universities. I think, next generation, as they come out, this generation that's coming out today actually is data science trained. So it's a big difference. There is a huge skills gap out there. Every big enterprise you talk tells you my biggest problem is actually, I don't have skilled people. Can you help me hire people? I say, hey we're not in the recruiting business. But, the good news is, if you look at the universities, they're all training thousands and thousands of data scientists every year now. I can tell you just at Cal, because, I happpen to be on the faculty there, is, almost every applicant now, to grad school, wants to do something AI related. Which has actually led to, if you look at all the programs in universities today, people used to do networking, professors used to do networking, say we do intelligent networks. People who do databases say, we do intelligent databases. People who do systems research say, hey we do intelligent systems, right? So what that means is, in a couple years you'll have lots of students coming out and these companies, that are now struggling hiring, then will be able to hire this talent and will actually succeed better with these AI projects. >> As they say in Berkley, nothing like a good revolution once in a while. AI is kind of changing everyone over. I got to ask you for the young kids out there, and parents who have kids either in elementary school or high school, everyone is trying to figure out, and there's no yet clear playbook, we're starting to see first generation training, but is there a skill set, because there's a range in surface area, you got hardcore coding to ethics, and everything in between from visualization, multiple dimensions of opportunities. What skills do you that people could hone or tweak that may not be on a curriculum that they could get, or pieces of different curriculums in school that would be a good foundation for folks learning and wanting to jump in to data and data value, whether it's coding to ethics? >> Yeah, just looking at my own background and seeing how, what I got to learn in school, the thing that was lacking, compared to what's needed today, is statistics. Understanding of statistics, statistical knowledge, That I think, it's going to be pervasive. So I think, 10, 15 years from now, no matter which field you're in, actually whatever job you have, you have to have some basic level of statistical understanding 'cause the systems you're working with will be, they'll be spitting out statistics and numbers and you need to understand what is false positives, what is this, what is the sample, what is that? What do these things mean? So that's one thing that's definitely missing and actually it's coming, that's one. The second is computing will continue being important. So, in the intersection of those two is, I think a lot of those jobs. >> In all fields, we were talking about earlier, biology, everything's intersecting, biochemistry to whatever right? >> (Ali) Yeah. >> I got to ask you about, well I'm a little old school, I'm 53 years old but I remember when I broke into the business coding, I used to walk into departments, they were called DP, data processing. So we're getting into the data processing world now, you've got statistics, you've got pipeline, these are data concepts. So I got to ask you as companies that are in the enterprise may be slower to move to the cutting edge like you guys are, they got to figure out where to store the data. So can you share your opinion or view on how customers are thinking and how they maybe should be architecting data on premise, in the cloud. Certainly cloud's great, if you're getting cloud native for pure SAS, and born in the cloud like a start-up. But if you're a large enterprise, and you want to be SAS-like, to have all that benefit, take the risk with the reward of being agile, you got to have data because if you don't the data into the machine learning or AI, you're not going to have good AI. So you need to get that data feeding in fast. And if it's constrained with regulation compliance you're screwed. So what's your view on this? Where should it be stored? What's your opinion? >> Yeah, we've had the same opinion for five, six years, right? Which is the data belongs in the cloud. Don't try to do this yourself. Don't try to do this on prem. Don't store it in, at Duke, it's not built for this. Store it in the cloud. In the cloud, first of all, you get a lot of security benefits that the cloud vendors are already working on. So that's one good thing about it. Second, you get it, it's realiable. You get the 10, 11 lines of availability, so that's great, you get that. Start collecting data there. Another reason you want to do it in the cloud is that a lot of the data sets that you need to actually get good quality results, are available in the cloud. Often times what happens with AI is, you build a predictive model, but actually, it's terrible. It didn't work well. So you go back, and then the main trick, the first tricks you use to increase the quality is actually augmenting that data with other data sets. You might purchase those data sets from other vendors. You don't want to be shipping hard drives around or, you know, getting that into your data center. Those will be available in the cloud, so you can augment that data. So we're big fans of storing your data in data lakes, in the cloud. We obviously believe that you need to make that data high quality and reliable. With that we believe the Delta Lake platform, open-source project that we created is a great vehicle for that. But I think moving to the cloud is the number one thing. >> (John) And hybrid works with that if you need to have something on premise? >> In my opinion the two worlds are so different, that it's hard. You hear a lot of vendors that say we're the hybrid solution that works on both and so on. But the two models are so different, fundamentally, that it's hard to actually make them work well. I have not yet seen a customer yet or enterprise. You see a lot of offerings, where people say hybrid is the way. Of course, a lot of on prem vendors are now saying, hey, we're the hybrid solution. I haven't actually seen that be successful to be frank. Maybe someone will crack that nut but-- >> I think it's an operational question to see who can make it work. Ali, congratulations on all your success. Great to see you. >> Yeah it's been great having you on the show. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> You are watching theCUBE, Informatica 2019. I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier, stay tuned.

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to AWS re:Invent, along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls, we are live here in Las Vegas. Day two of our three days of coverage of this event, seventh time we've been here and, as we've been saying all along, this show is getting bigger and better than ever. About 40,000 attendees this year. Joined now by Abbas Haider Ali, CTO of xMatters, and Chris Crocco, who is the lead solutions architect at Viasat. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us, good to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Thanks for having us on. >> All right, tell us a little bit about your respective endeavors and then why the two of you are here together, and Abbas I'll let you lead off. >> Sure, I'm CTO at xMatters, as you described, and our company is basically a digital service availability platform which, outside the marketing speak, and from a technical perspective, means, when bad things happen with technology, and all technology's great but, inevitably, things go wrong-- >> Bad things happen. >> Bad things happen and we're in the business to helping companies get those things fixed as quickly as possible, ideally before they become business-impacting. And basically, I asked Chris here to join me because you can have technology but you need someone to put it into practice and Chris has done a great job of bringing it in to real world at Viasat. >> Good transition, thanks Abbas. My role at Viasat, Viasat's a satellite-based technology and communications company, and my role is to help administer and deploy some of our automations for orchestration monitoring performance and incident management. A lot of that has to do, as it relates to xMatters, with notifying people when they eventually have to go hands-on-keyboard and minimizing the amount of administrative burden that they have so they can just focus on fixing a problem. >> You mentioned before that everyone who was traveling here on an airplane, if they were using the wifi, they're probably running over your service? >> Right, yeah, so one of our-- >> I am astounded that that even works at all, speaking of technology breaking all the time. Maybe explain to us a little bit about how xMatters helps you keep that thing actually functioning. >> Yeah, that's a great question. One of the things that we monitor very, very tightly is our customer experience, both on aircraft, and residential broadband, and so when we're starting to see things where those planes are passing through beams and maybe not handing off the internet connectivity well, if we're seeing people trying to get on the internet and they're either having a slow time or just not getting on at all, one of the things that we want to do is get that to the right people quickly. So, one of the things that we do is we have our customer care elements of commercial mobility in xMatters so that they can report that to the engineering level for that same area of business. When they do that it's opening up a sales force case, it's notifying a Hipchat room, it's getting hold of the on-call resource, and it's also administrating all of that stuff back to the originator of the problem, so that they can keep them informed of "this is what the engineer found, "this is how long it's going to take to get fixed, "this is what you need to tell the customers." So it's enabling a lot of communication while reducing some of the traditional operational elements that go along with incident management. >> Yeah, it's something that we've been hearing quite a bit this week here at AWS, is the importance of that operations side of things. It feels like the whole industry has moved from this being a new technology that we should start doing brand new things with, and it's matured a little bit, where we're actually relying on this stuff to run real multi-billion dollar businesses and operations starts to become really, really important so, as you said, when things break, we want to fix them as fast as possible, so that customers can keep using our services. >> Right, and kind of in the path, when you look at all the companies that are here, they're building fantastic new products, builders are a big part of this event, it's all about building their services and you hear a lot about automation and tool change and the CI/CD pipeline. Well, the CI/CD pipeline really ends at delivery. And that's kind of where our product picks up. So it's in the operations and support realm of it is, once it's out there, things inevitably will go wrong and a lot of the companies you see here are all about detecting that very, very quickly. You'll hear conversations about one-second resolution in detect issues, and those things have to be handled. And really, one of the things that we're seeing a big trend in is going through and saying, "How do we remove the manual process, "and administrative overhead, and the toil "in actually operating these services, "when, inevitably, something goes wrong." And it starts off small and can grow very quickly, so a lot of people use our product, to essentially tie those alerting systems directly into xMatters, it goes out, gathers a lot of the information that people would typically do by hand, the manual effort, delivers it to the right on-call person and arms them with the action and move them through. And really, that cycle of steps, if you think of it as every individual team and service has a series of flows that they go through when things go wrong. It's about taking those steps and putting them all together in the right order and swapping them out as you need to as your service matures and grows. And as your innovation is successful and as you grow in scope, those steps may change, but the flows across the teams remain remarkably-- >> Is there-- >> The same. >> You talk about flows, different avenues, different opportunities, or problems, is there one that tends to stand out amongst the crowd as "That's our biggest headache," whether, for Chris's business, or just, in general, for any of your clients, is there one that leaves you scratching your head? >> If we go around and just interview all the various enterprises, who are consumers and builders of a service and we ask them, saying, "Hey, what's the single biggest thing that's kind of a pain when things go wrong?" One of the biggest problems that we see is that a lot of these organizations have built kind of a distributed operation model. And one of the biggest problems we see is, if you think of it as, you've got a whole series of things, a series of, kind of spokes, and one thing goes wrong, other people are consumers of it, and other people are impacted. All get engaged, saying my thing is also sending me a signal saying "My work has gone sideways," but it's very difficult to figure out where the actual responsibility lies and how do you engage just the people who could actually fix the issue and then let everyone else who is impacted by it be informed, but told to stand down, so they don't waste their cycles on resolving that. And that's a very complicated problem that there is no magical solution for so if anyone's listening and looking for "Okay, "that's what I've got, give me an answer," I don't have a solution for you (laughing) but I can tell you that a lot of these sorts of operational tasks we're putting in place are designed to minimize the effort of figuring out what that is and really speeding up that information cycle so you waste as little time as possible. >> Does that sound familiar, Chris? >> Very familiar, yeah. Viasat's company motto is "Always a better way" and so one of the things we do with xMatters and other tools in our incident response chain is take what we learn when we do have an incident, when we do have a problem, and find a better way of approaching that. It allows us to refine our integrations into xMatters. It allows us to communicate more effectively to the right people. It allows us to really kind of harness our DevOps model and that company credo to our advantage and constantly perform better for our customers. >> We were talking before we went live here, this is dealing with issues at the scale of space, so these sort of problems, and it's a theme that we've been hearing over the last couple of days, that the amount of complexity on these kinds of systems, and something at the scale of a space-based platform. This is something which isn't really tractable for the human mind to deal with unaided, so we really do need tools like xMatters to actually cope with this. But what has putting in something like xMatters done for the business of Viasat? What does that actually change, that you're now able to do that you weren't able to do before? >> Again, xMatters enables a lot of opportunity for our DevOps teams to constantly improve. One of the things that I personally like about xMatters a lot is it's not a centralized tool. A lot of tools in this space are intended for you to be constantly looking at a dashboard or have an incident captain that's always, their life is that tool. >> A single glass of pane. >> Right, but all of these teams have their own single pane of glass that they consume, so we can plug in xMatters where it's appropriate and allow those tool chains and those automation flows to include xMatters but not have it be the end all, be all of their process, so it helps them improve on all of the other parts of incident management and monitoring and xMatters is just there to facilitate those transactions and those workflows. So, a lot of value there, a lot of learning opportunities and a lot of enablement for all of our DevOps teams. >> So you can improve the way that you're doing things without having to rip out everything else and replace it with one new tool. >> Exactly, one of the things that you don't want to do in any organization is throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. There are tools that can be refined and we see a lot of this in the trend toward micro-services, right? Instead of having vendor lock-in, this huge one-stop shop for everything, you can pull and replace all of the smaller pieces in that chain without affecting your availability or your ability to respond to an event. >> And one really interesting thing about these distributed models is you still have places where information needs to wind up, so if I'm working on a particular part of my application and I've got a customer service team that uses Salesforce as their system of choice, I have to get information to Salesforce so they can consume it. It's not okay for me to hoard information, I actually want to make sure that I'm minimizing the friction and moving information along to where it needs to wind up, along that process. If I am a developer, my kind of world view of my tasks are Jira, I want to make sure the information winds up there. If I'm in a service management team and I use something like ServiceNow, kind of track information there, I have to make information wind up there. We collaborate in Slack, I have to make sure that it's available within that world as well. So the key thing that we're really focused about is every team picks their own flows, they pick their own tools, but the steps along the way are very similar. Something goes wrong, you pull in the information, you need help, you need a collaboration step, and you need a basic information delivery stage to put information back in the right places because after it's done, to Chris's point, if you just solved the problem very effectively and learned nothing, you've done a bad job. We have to be clear about that, right? Learning and improvement is a key part of a successful DevOps transition, and when you're running things at the scale we're talking about at re:Invent, you have to learn. And a key part is making sure information winds up in the right places so you're able to do that. >> Getting them halfway happy won't cut it, right? >> Right, I would fully expect that Chris and other customers in Viasat's position would be like, "Yeah, that's great, we did it great this time, "but when it happens again, we would have learned nothing." >> What do we do next? >> Right, exactly. >> Right. >> Gentlemen, thank you for the time. We appreciate you sharing your story and wish you success. >> Thanks very much for having us on. >> For the rest of this week, enjoy the show. >> Thank you very much. >> Off to a great start, that's for sure. >> Thank you. >> Back with more from AWS re:Invent, with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls, and you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(tech music) >> Live, from Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to our live coverage here in Bahrain for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS Summit here in the Middle East in the region. Our first time here, lots of observations, lots of learnings, and also great people we're meeting. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Our next guest is Mohammed Ali Al Qaed, who is the Chief Executive of the Information E-Government Authority, also known as IGA. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, thank you for hosting me. >> Saw you last night at dinner. We were talking about all the opportunities. So the first question I have to ask you is, as you guys are bringing in the digital transformation, which is happening, you now have Amazon here with the region, how is that changing things? >> Of course, always we try to innovate, and the technology, if you don't innovate, if you don't make sure that you are ready for the changes coming, it is very difficult. When we announced our first strategy in 2007, we delivered it in 2010 becoming the leader in the region, delivering 200 services over four channels. But as you mentioned, usually in the technology, the longest cycle is the infrastructure and servers and configurations, buying things and configuring. And with the leadership vision of transforming the country the vision 2030, transformations happening in the judicial system and to the commercial legislations and to the customs and to health and education, the pace of change required and the ambition is very much, much higher. And particularly, when you develop something and you were successful. So our leaders say, we are a bit slow. We need to fast things up. So then we looked into the Amazon and the cloud. How it can help us. And usually, in Bahrain, we don't have the luxury of trial and error. Trying things and if it works, you know, try multiple things. So we have to study it well. This is why we looked into the cloud, what it can bring to the country, the agility, the time to market. And when we put the strategy forward, it was a comprehensive one. The leaders decided to go cloud-first policy. Everybody should move. Because that's the way forward, that's the way that the Kingdom can deliver its vision-- >> And the cloud-first decision, when was that made? >> That was last year. And, when it was made, it's not a piece of strategy. You have to look at it in a comprehensive way. >> Yeah. >> You have to look into your laws, legislations, compliance, >> Yeah. >> audits, architectures, unit policies, skills sets available, the procurement process, the tendering process, and you have to review all of that-- >> Yeah. >> and make sure that there is no show blockers or barriers for the implementation. Otherwise, it will take a long time. >> Yeah. (chuckles) >> This is why, in a year's time, we managed to migrate huge workloads to the cloud. >> We were talking last night about how hard it is just to figure out the future, never mind provisioning all the gear you got to do, and the training, and so this cloud-first is very interesting. But I also want to just tell you that we talked about, also, how hard it is. So when I say, oh, go cloud-first, it's so easy! Right? No, it isn't. There's a lot of work involved. >> Yes. >> Take us through some of the things that you guys have done, your learnings prior to cloud-first. And the key learnings now that cloud-first has been under your belt for over a year. >> Of course, always with the governments, the biggest challenge will happen about the security. How I am going to move losing the control, putting my processing and storage outside the government. How I'm going to protect it, somebody else is there. That's the biggest challenge. That's number one. Number two, people doesn't understand, they think it's processing. So okay, I have my processing power, I will save some money, that's not much. >> Yeah. >> But they don't think about the ultimate goal. About the time to market. >> Yeah. >> When you have a new vision, when you have a new service to be delivered, you cannot wait for 18, 24 months for the infrastructure-- >> Yeah. >> Getting there, idle for a couple of years until you know the full utilization of them. So this is why the ultimate goal is much, much bigger. >> Yeah. >> And the thing about the issue, of somebody else, looking into-- >> So speed is critical. >> Yeah. >> And you guys have speed under your belt. You did a Formula One racetrack in what, 14 months I heard, very fast construction. The Amazon region is going up in record time. Is this a cultural thing? Just go fast? People like speed? The need for speed? >> We like that, you know the Formula One, of course that's just part of our DNA. Our leaders always push the citizens. And that's the Bahraini culture. >> Yeah, the other thing, too, about the application, now to get back to our serious conversation, to have innovation, you need to have software development go on in a way that's not the 24-month, oh we built it, and you don't know if you tested it or not. But you got to built the dev-ops model infrastructure as code. How far along are you on the infrastructure as code? Because the developer side is going to be very great. >> [Mohammed Ali Al Qaed] Yeah. >> Amazon's proven that developers love it, easy to get going, lower cost to test, agility, time to market, time to value. The setup for you guys is a little bit different. You've got infrastructure as code-- >> Yeah. >> You're not a startup. But you want to act like one, but what are you going to do for the infrastructure? >> Of course, the infrastructure in terms of processing, that's easy because it's been migrated, most of it's been migrated, our ports, our channels, our mobile channels. >> The networks, you have 5G, do you have 5G here yet? >> We are already experimenting, ready for it. The frequency's already freed up for the telco's to utilize them. It's already there for the 5G. Of course, fiber is everywhere, all the government entities are connected to the fiber. High speed, we have 100-meg, we have a gig, we have 10 gig, we have all kinds of speed available. >> No problem for bandwidth in the country. >> I don't think so. We don't have an issue about the bandwidth. And the processing power, once moved, then the optimization, which already happened. But as you mentioned, coming to the development, we started already, developing into the serverless, using the lamdas, using born-in-the-cloud concepts, that was not there once we started. But now we are already educating and training our employees. >> What's the reaction to it? >> The reaction is excellent. I give an example today about the fingerprint authentication. That's a basic service, but it requires a huge demand return from all the telco's, all transactions happen in telco's, private hospitals, the banking are coming. >> Yeah. >> Any authentication happens, it has to happen in a second. >> Yeah. >> So that requires a huge, massive infrastructure. Once we built it, at the beginning, for only a few customers-- >> Yeah. >> we invested about 250,000 dinar at that time. Now, I think, it's being moved completely to serverless-- >> Yeah. >> Concept, a new development. >> Yeah. >> So... >> A simple idea, hard to implement in the old way, but the new way, you got to wire API's around, sling API's, and connect devices, telco's, environments quickly. So this brings up the integration, this is the benefit of the cloud. >> [Mohammed Ali Al Qaed] Exactly. >> The glue layer is, what, microservices? Is it API's? How are you making that lambda function...? >> You know, that API's, and, just, you call the service and it gets you online and you go back to the storage. I mean, a basic thing. >> Yeah. >> Initially, you know, you need a testing environment, a development environment, a lot of infrastructure, and then you have to secure all of that, secure your data. >> Yeah. >> Now, it's a fraction of that cost and much faster to go to market. >> I'm a huge believer in the services model, and this is why microservices is a big deal right now in clouds, if you look at all the cloud-native conversations, it's containers, we're using it, no problem, very good to use containers. They're great. Kubernetes, now, orchestration. But deal with state and stateless applications is now the new challenge because there are so many new services that are spinning up. Soon, you're going to be like, ordering McDonald's, you know, I'll have a microservice over here, so this is the world we're moving to. This is the services. >> Exactly. And we would like to build a center of excellence, you know? Because we get into this journey, we looked into all our legislations and the ecosystem, trained our employees, their skillset is very important, with the program, with Tamkeen. We looked into the training strategy, all the portfolio training, making sure that our Bahrainees have the ability to develop, to operate, databases and all aspects, even the planning of it. Then institutes, partners, to be ready to train the private sector and everybody. >> You know, Mohammed, I'm really impressed with the entrepreneurial people that I've met. They've got a good mojo to them, because they're kind of cocky, which I love about them, but they're not arrogant. They're like, they're smart, and I so I got a... I see a good community there. The question for you is, as you move to cloud-native, how is that transition? The young kids get it. I mean, it's no problem. >> Yeah. >> Where's the progress on the skillset gap? I've heard that conversation. I just don't see it being a problem if the young kids are eating up the cloud stuff like it's nobody's business. >> Yeah. >> Then I don't see a problem. What's your take on this skills gap thing? I mean, the guys I met, and the entrepreneurs, they're like, they want more action. >> Exactly. The point is the current employees that we have already. Hundreds of government employees that have been trained in a different environment with different technologies. I get a couple of questions from some of the professionals in the market, private sector and government sector: how we can benefit out of that? How we can help? We are experts in the field, but cloud for us is a new thing. So as you mentioned, for them it might be a bit more difficult. So what we did, and the IGA, we created a taskforce of the most brilliant team, and told them okay, you have to migrate the workloads, train, we'll give you the training, and you have to migrate. >> Go. >> Next, you have now to optimize. Give the task of migration to somebody else, a new team, and the old team, they have to optimize. Third, now you have to work on, bore on the cloud, develop on the cloud, create the environment of the cloud, a new concept. So that's how we take-- >> So you're spreading the work around through hands-on training? >> Of course. You train, and then you get them into the action, hands, on, and so on, one by one. But, eventually, the university's already working on training their students. So we want to make sure that part of the curriculum, the cloud is there for the new generations to take it from day one. >> You know, you guys are a learning culture, my observation, first time here, very impressed. Very friendly, which is always cool. But, it's a multilingual culture. So, if you add source code to the new lingua, coding is going to be critical. Are you guys getting at the younger generation really when they're young? How young are you going in terms of the new language, software... Thoughts on that? Where do you see that going? >> Starting from school-- >> Elementary school? >> From elementary school, trying to get them in to coding. Universities as well. >> So you are teaching kids to code? >> Of course. And you know, any citizen they can get any certifications free of charge, according to the agreement with Tamkeen Labor Fund. They are willing to train any Bahrainian on any certifications, professional certifications, free of charge. >> That's great. >> To be ready for the next, and making Bahrainians-- >> So there's no excuses. >> Of course. >> There it is. >> We want to give Bahrainians a choice for employment. >> Yeah. >> You know? If that's the future, we have to make them ready for the future. >> That's great. And the cloud's going to give you all that energy. Talk about the relationship with Amazon a bit, Amazon Web Services. Obviously, Teresa Carlson, really behind this, the whole team. I talk about the whole company, I see them getting behind this and partnering with you guys. They're not just coming in here and being Amazon. There's a real co-development ethos. Talk about the relationship you have with... >> Amazon is impressive. I mean, the way that we work, in a partnership way, everybody should think about the long-term, not the short-term part of the partnership. That they should help the economy, the Bahrainis for employment, making sure that the economy will benefit out of this move to Bahrain. And as well, we have to help with the registrations, with the regulations, with any infrastructure connectivity to the international links. Whatever they need, we try to help them because we believe that eventually it will create the ecosystem for the market. >> I know they open up a lot of doors for you guys, and then for us as well. They attracted us to come and cover the territory here, so we're super excited. And I'm so glad we came because I learned a lot. >> Thank you. >> It's been fantastic. Okay, your big idea... Final question. What's your big idea that's going to come out of the cloud? It doesn't have to be the complete... Your idea, in your personal opinion, what is going to happen five years down the road? What is it going to look like? What will this new magic look like? What's the outcome? >> I think it will be a major restructure and reform in the government. So most of the people working into the routine work of buying and configuring, buying and configuring, they can be more focused into the real problem about the innovation, trying to bring solutions to the problems and issues in the country. Trying to develop software that will help the economy to foster, and to look at what is required, what is the vision of the leaders, try to implement those. So most of the people think business. Before, it was isolation. The technical people only, they had their territory, their environment looking at the wires and hardware and configurations, and somebody else looking into the development and a third group of people who are looking strategically, analytics, and how to utilize it. So, I think what we'll have, we'll merge those people, thinking only about the solutions, and how to analyze and how to come with new solutions out of those analytics. >> And that model has been consolidated, those silos have been broken down. With the cloud, it brings it all together. Developers are now on the front lines. >> Of course. And those-- >> And they're driving the business. >> They're driving the business. >> Mohammed, great to have you on, great to see you. Thanks for sharing your insight. And congratulations. Looking forward to tracking all the great coverage. Amazing opportunity here for everyone in the country, and also for Amazon and for us. Great to meet new people. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. You can reach me on Twitter @Furrier, F-U-R-R-I-E-R, or just search, I'm open. All my channels are open, Telegram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, you name it. Say hello, reach out. Stay with us, more all-day coverage after this short break. (tech music)